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TMS320C5534: Transferring a boot image from Uart to the DSP

Part Number: TMS320C5534

Hi,

I know this question has been raised tons of times, but am afraid I could not find yet a clear answer.

Basically, we have a C5534 DSP slave to an Sitara ARM CPU. The Sitara governs the DSP reset.

We would like to use the DSP Bootloader, to allow transferring of an DSP firmware image from the sitara to the DSP.

My understanding is that, the DSP bootloader would revert to a "Uart Boot" if none of the preceding source were ok.

What I fail to understand is, what is the protocol used between the DSP and the host to transfer these chunks ?

Some older docs hinted to a "PING/ACK scheme", while some other sources say "just throw the code thru the uart ..."

What I did: I built a small dsp fw for testing, which toggles a LED at a low frequency.

From the Sitara (running linux), i can reboot the DSP and also invalidate the SPI Flash interface (tying the CE to 1) so i expect the bootloader to start talking to the Uart.

I pushed all teh files from the sitara to the Uart, then reset the DSP but nothing happened ...

Can somebody point me to a description of the protocol used between both ?

Thanks,

Jacques

  • The team is notified. They will post their feedback directly here.

    BR
    Tsvetolin Shulev
  • Hi,
    despite the lack of answers (:() we managed to solve this by reverse engineering the uart path. Basically, there is no specific protocol, the host has to send the file as is. On some occasions I noticed that the uartBoot app on windows was waiting a small bit between sending the signature and the rest (probably for letting the dsp decide if this is OK), so we have added a small 200 ms delay between both steps.

    so the process is (from the host side -- linux )
    1- disable the CS of the spi flash
    2- send a reset pulse to the DSP (and wait some ms)
    3- send the signature (0x09 0xAA) andwait 200 ms
    4 - send the rest of the file

    Jacques