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Cannot download U-Boot via UART3

IsaacLeung
Intellectual 395 points
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: TPS65950

We've been working with the Mistral EVM, so I'm pretty familiar with the procedure by now. But we've moved on to our own board, which is very, very similar to the EVM (different clock frequency, TPS65950 instead of the TWL device and some extra peripherals). It is close enough that I would expect it to work exactly like the EVM.

 

I'm running into an issue downloading "u-boot.bin" onto the device via UART3 using the "DownloadUtility.exe" that came with 1.0.2, the message says " Unknown error occurred during secondary file download. Please try again"

Is there any way to get a bit more information about what the error might be? Any error logs or anything?

We have verified that OMAP is getting all the appropriate power, the boot mode pins have been set up to be exactly the same configuration as the EVM, verified that all clocks appear to be active. I've 'scoped out the UART3 interface pins and I'm getting nice toggling signals there when the download tries to start. (And UART3 uses exactly the same pins on OMAP as EVM). The OMAP is using Micron PoP instead of the Samsung OneNAND that is on our EVM

Any clues where I might start looking for the issue?

  • 0
    Intellectual 395 points

    I have made a bit of progress on this, but not completely resolved yet.

    - It seems the download utility is really expecting a 26MHz system clock, so it was not recognizing the ack back from OMAP. We decided to patch in a 26MHz clock instead of the 38.4MHz clock and we got farther.

    - The issue seems to be the boot mode settings. We tried a few settings, the last one being the one in the 02.01.01.07 Getting Started Guide, which is UART3 / NAND booting. However, the "DownloadUtility.exe" now reports that Flash config is wrong and to check SW4.

    We are using Micron PoP, but it is not the same config as the one used in the EVM. We are using a configuration with 4Gb NAND / 2Gb RAM. Is the "DownloadUtility" not capable of handling this configuration?

     

    Our other options is to try and prepare a boot system on microSD card or try to program the Flash from JTAG port if that is at all possible...

    Is there any other way to load up U-Boot into some sort of non-volatile memory?

  • 0 in reply to IsaacLeung
    TI__Mastermind 41665 points

    IsaacLeung said:

    Our other options is to try and prepare a boot system on microSD card or try to program the Flash from JTAG port if that is at all possible...

    Is there any other way to load up U-Boot into some sort of non-volatile memory?

    Booting from a SD card and than burning the boot loader into the flash from there is a valid way of proceeding, though you may run into similar problems if your board varies from the EVM where you would have to modify the x-loader and/or u-boot image to function with your particular hardware. There are some good articles for this procedure from Beagle Board here which will largely apply to your situation as well.

    As to programming from JTAG, this is certainly possible however I do not know of a utility to manage this (generally the serial boot, MMC boot, or USB boot have been enough), essentially you would need to write code to burn the flash that you load with JTAG.

  • 0 in reply to Bernie Thompson TI
    Intellectual 395 points

    I don't suppose it is possible to get at the source code for the "DownloadUtility.exe"? Other than the clock and PoP config issue, it should work just like the Mistral EVM, so it should be a simple matter to modify the dowload/flash program to work with the new PoP config.

     

    Otherwise I will probably try the JTAG route, as I've done this before on a similar board (though with different processor).

  • 0 in reply to IsaacLeung
    TI__Mastermind 41665 points

    IsaacLeung said:
    I don't suppose it is possible to get at the source code for the "DownloadUtility.exe"?

    The DownloadUtility.exe is owned by Mistral, so you would have to contact them in regards to obtaining any source, I am not sure how available it is if it is at all, I have not seen the source myself. The closest source I know of would be the serial boot and flash loading utility for the Davinci devices, though these would take some significant modification to work with the OMAP3.

     EDIT: Forget the Davinci utilities, Nishanth's utility below should do the trick.

  • 0 in reply to Bernie Thompson TI
    TI__Prodigy 520 points

    Bernie Thompson said:

    The DownloadUtility.exe is owned by Mistral, so you would have to contact them in regards to obtaining any source, I am not sure how available it is if it is at all, I have not seen the source myself. The closest source I know of would be the serial boot and flash loading utility for the Davinci devices, though these would take some significant modification to work with the OMAP3.

     

    for pure opensource solution - you may be interested in reading this

  • 0 in reply to Nishanth Menon
    Intellectual 395 points

    Thank you.

    That actually helps a lot. After some editing to fit our board and a quick re-compile (and working around some git glitch in the final package that is needed), I can at least get u-Boot into RAM.

    Now all that's left is to figure out why I cannot see my NAND....

    (It's a Micron PoP which should have 4Gbit flash, 2Gbit DRAM)

  • 0 in reply to IsaacLeung
    Prodigy 40 points

    Hi IsaacLeung,

    I have a similar problem as yours, We replace the Micron PoP memory to 4G flash, 2Gbit DRAM

    and failed to download the u-boot using the DownloadUtility.exe

    When trying it, the tool gives a message (Please check Switch(SW4) settings according to the flash type).

    Did you found a solution for your problem ? how ?

    Thanks,

    Noam Bechor

    Tonson Labs