[coreboot] QA contribution

[Joseph Smith]

On Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:05:24 +0200, Juhana Helovuo <juhe at iki.fi> wrote:
> 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

Wow! that is really cool! I hope it works out as planned :-)

-- 
Thanks,
Joseph Smith
Set-Top-Linux
www.settoplinux.org