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Boot mode suggestions?

Hello everyone,

I am more of a hardware engineer than a software engineer, so please bear with me.  I am trying to create a board with an AM335x.  On this I am using the following modules:

  • I2C0
  • LCDC
  • MMC0
  • OSC0
  • OSC1
  • RTC
  • USB0

I had planned on using the SPI0 under boot mode #3 and boot from a FLASH part like the W25Q64 part on the Eval board.  We are using the Android development system and my software engineer is telling me that a boot image can only be created for the Linux system, on a Linux system.

Since I am using the LCD module, I will have pin conflicts with the GPMC module and am trying to avoid that if possible.

Can you tell me if there are any resources on how to create a serial boot image for Android, and/or if there is another way I should plan to do this?

Thanks so much for your input..

Jonathan

  • Hi Jonathan,
     
    Are you planning to use the ZCE package? On the ZCZ package there will be no conflict to accomodate both GPMC and LCD (see EVM schematics, link is http://www.ti.com/litv/zip/sprr164). I also think Android can be booted from eMMC. Check out these links too:
     
    Best Regards
    Biser
  • Jonathan,

    I may be missing your question here but if I understand you correctly that you want to boot from SPI0 and also enable LCD then my question back is whether you need the LCD enabled during the boot loader phase (An unsupported feature today anyway).  In general you should be able to boot from SPI, and then when the kernel loads reconfigure the pinmux to support the LCD.

    If from the running Linux system you want to update the SPI content then you would have an issue.

    Does this help at all or is there something else about your use case I'm not understanding?

    Chase

  • Hello Biser,

    Thank you very much for the information.  This is the ZCZ package.  I think that between you and Chase, you have answered my question.

    We are using that EVM module for development right now, so that is where a lot of my education is coming from.  I recently learned of the simpler Starter Kit for the same family of processor, that I need to read up on now.

    If I am to understand it I can use the GPMC module to load the program to run from RAM and then switch the bus over to the LCD.  If this is the case, it is good to note for my specifications that they both can't be used at the same time so we would have to suspend the screen during reads/writes to memory.

    My end-goal is to make something cheap to assemble, and that I can buy pre-programmed with the code so there isn't any human intervention required beyond assembly of the end product with the pre-programmed board.  Any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated on this front.

    Thanks again for your input.  I look forward to hearing what you (and your colleagues) have to say while I get an education on the starter kit.

    Best Regards,

    Jonathan