[coreboot] QA contribution

[Juhana Helovuo]

30.1.2011 13:16, Peter Stuge kirjoitti:

> Personally I believe that development is what is missing to get
> corebot testing going to a greater extent. As you will see in the
> documentation there are fairly many requirements for an individual
> mainboard to actually be hooked up to the test system. It's fully
> automated once it runs, but it's too complicated to get there.
>
> I think this needs to be optimized and to some degree productized,
> into an easy to buy and fairly affordable (<100$) unit that can
> administer testing of one or even better several mainboards. I have
> plenty of design and implementation ideas if you'd like to go into
> that.

Hello all,

I started building a tester device to hook up a mainboard into an 
automated test host.

The basic plan is as follows: The host computer is connected to tester 
device via USB. The tester is connected to the target mainboard so that 
it can take control of the BIOS ROM and reprogram it regardless of the 
state of the target mainbaord.

The tester device can also connect to the serial port of the target 
mainboard, so it can act as a serial-over-USB-device. This is because 
otherwise controlling the test of N mainboards would require N serial 
ports in the host.

The tester also has two FET switches for controlling the reset and ATX 
power buttons on the target mainboard.

The actual AC power control of the target mainboard is not included and 
should be done by another device, such as this:
http://www.gembird.nl/default.aspx?op=products&op2=item&id=3234

So far there is support only for SPI ROMs, but the design could be 
modified to support LPC and FWH also.

The tester device is basically an Atmel Atmega microcontroller, which 
can talk USB, RS232, SPI, and generic digital I/O.

Here are some images of my first (incomplete) prototype:

http://alpskari.asiantuntijat.org/~juhe/spi-flasher-piirilevyt/

The images were originally taken just to illustrate the PCB making 
experiment via the toner transfer method, but you can also see what the 
device looks like. The smaller board is specific to SPI ROMs and 
attaches to the SPI ROM socket on the mainbaord. The larger PCB is a 
microcontroller, which connects all the parts together.

Both the software and hardware are incomplete. Hardware is missing some 
parts and work.

The software is not yet done, except a prototype microcontroller program 
that can read and program SPI ROMs. It is controlled by "flashrom" from 
Linux host. It can communicate via serial port using the "serial 
programmer" protocol. Flashrom program was modified by adding a 
"serprog-spi"-module, which is modified from "serprog", mainly by 
adapting it to suit SPI.


Best regards,
Juhana Helovuo