DLPDLCR230NPEVM: DLPDLCR230NPEVM fault, FPGA and/or DLP3436 failure?

George,

Welcome to the E2E forums, and thank you for your interest in our DLP technology.

It sounds like something may be preventing the system from booting. Consider the following:

> Do you have the Raspberry Pi ribbon cable connected? If so, try powering the system without the Raspberry Pi for now.

> Are you sure that the system is connected with a 5A supply? I have seen similar behavior occur if an insufficient power supply (e.g. <3A) is connected. Which power supply are you using?

> Was the system ever working or is this behavior out of the box?

Regards,

Philippe Dollo

Dear Philippe,

Thank you for your reply,

I am afraid the EVM behaviour was straight out of the box. I never connected the raspberry pi, because I wanted first to check the system (EVM) optical output. So I initially wanted to display the logo on  a test screen. So I powered it up with a 5A power supply, and the behaviour I described was there, then I suspected the same thing as you did (the power supply) and I powered the EVM with a 10A bench power supply that we use to test our electronic instrumentation. The behaviour is still the same. The EVM momentarily flashes an image (I can't tell what it is cause the flashing is quick) and then it repeats.  Also the D_HOST_IRQ is constantly On, and the D_DONE goes On and Off. My conclusion is also that the EVM can't boot up and it repeats the process. it doesn't appear to be a hardware issue, a firmware fault maybe? is there a way we can flush the firmware or it has to be done back in Ti?

Dear Austin,

The firmware to download indicates to select an i2c ID of 0x36 or 0x3a, I connected the raspberry pi to the EVM and tried to find out which i2c id the EVM has (as raspi is the master in this case), so I executed the well known: i2cdetect -y 1  command but nothing shows on the i2c bus? the EVM is constantly flashing, is it because the boot procedure is not complete, I can't interrogate the EVM? if this is the case, how do I flush the firmware if I can't execute i2c commands?

George,

it is possible to reprogram the flash device of the system yourself provided you have a Raspberry Pi connected to it. The python support package included with this EVM provides a script for reflashing the system over SPI (regardless of whether the DLPC3436 is coming up or not).

You are likely experiencing one of two issues:

1. The SPI flash is somehow corrupted. You can verify the flash device using the Python support code on the Raspberry Pi (https://www.ti.com/tool/DLPDLCR230NPEVM)

2. One of the pins on header may be getting driven somehow due to interference in your setup. For instance, there is a PROJ_ON signal on J2 (Pin 37 PROJ_ON_RASP) that allows the Raspberry Pi to toggle the on-off state of the system. 

Based on your explanation I believe it is more likely you are seeing #2 versus #1. This is because a corrupted flash would more likely cause the system to never get to the point where D_DONE flashes on (only to flash back off). Starting with the schematic on https://www.ti.com/tool/TIDA-080009 you may want to verify that signals like PROJ_ON are not experiencing unwanted interference during bootup.

I attempted what you've mentioned, above with the Python support code but there is no response from the EVM. It keeps flashing the image continuously as before.  Also There is no setup interference issue because the  EVM does this from the start (out of the box), before I even connected the raspberry pi on it.

Also the company I work for, does not want to devote more time on to this and we've decided to return the EVM, we have bought it from mouser, so let me know how to proceed.

Dear Philippe,

I will inform mouser as, initially they asked us to get in contact with you, if we decided to return the EVM. The power supply model is: RIGOL DP811A bench PSU.