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Setup — Preparing the MCB2387 Board for eCos Development

Overview

In a typical development environment, the MCB2387 board boots from internal flash into the GDB stubrom. eCos applications are configured for RAM startup and then downloaded and run on the board via the debugger arm-eabi-gdb. Preparing the board therefore usually involves programming a suitable image into flash memory.

Initial Installation

Flash Installation

This process assumes that a Microsoft Windows machine with the Embedded Systems Academy Flash Magic utility is available. Install Flash Magic from http://www.flashmagictool.com. Connect a 9-pin serial cable from a COM port on the PC to the COM0 connector on the MCB2387 Board. Power the board via a USB cable.

Set the ISP jumpers (J9(RST) and J10(ISP) on, J13(ETM) off) and press the reset button. The board is now running a special NXP boot loader. Start Flash Magic and set the Communications section to select the COM port used above, 38400 baud, device LPC2387, Interface “None (ISP)” and 12MHz Oscillator Frequency. Test communication with the board by using the “ISP->Read Device Signature” menu entry. If communication is not successful, check that the serial cable is connected, the ISP jumpers are installed and the correct COM port is being used.

Check “Erase blocks used by Hex File” under “Erase”. In the “Hex File” section, select the stubrom.hex file. Under “Options”, all boxes should be clear except “Verify after programming”. Now press the “Start” button. The utility should show the progress of the upload.

When the process completes, the utility should be closed. Reset the ISP jumpers (J9(RST) and J10(ISP) off, J13(ETM) on). Verify the programming has been successful by starting a terminal emulation application such as HyperTerminal or minicom on the host PC and set the serial communication parameters to 38400 baud, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit (8N1) and no flow control (handshaking). Reset the board and the stubrom should start. The output should be similar to the following:

+$T050f:98070000;0d:48070040;#fc

This is the stubrom reporting it's state using the GDB remote protocol.

Rebuilding the Stubrom

Should it prove necessary to rebuild the Stubrom binary, this is done most conveniently at the command line. Assuming your PATH and ECOS_REPOSITORY environment variables have been set correctly, the steps needed to rebuild RedBoot for the MCB2387 are:

$ mkdir stub_mcb2387_rom
$ cd stub_mcb2387_rom
$ ecosconfig new mcb2387 stubs
$ ecosconfig resolve
$ ecosconfig tree
$ make

At the end of the build the install/bin subdirectory should contain the file stubrom.hex.