I am designing a mobile device around an Attiny84 microcontroller and when I have looked up ways of programming it and making it run, I found that I would need a JTAG progammer. Could the Attiny84 be programmed by USB with something else like a 6 pin header? What other ways can the Attiny84 be programmed?
P.S. No arduino and I am using snow leopard on my mac
The ATTiny84 can be programmed over SPI. See section 19.5 (page 163) of the datasheet for details.
To do this, you will need an AVR programmer (not a JTAG programmer; that's something quite different). One inexpensive option is the USBtinyISP.
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I bought a cheap board with Altera Cyclone II from ebay and want to start experimenting.
I created a simple program, after some research I managed to compile it and after flashing to the board the programming tool said it is 100% complete.
However the behaviour of the board has not changed since the time I first plugged the power supply in(three onboard LEDs are blinking).
It looks like the program has not been loaded to the board.
I don't know what I did wrong.
Any ideas? I am completely new to FPGAs. Thank you
Normally the configuration stream is written into fpga sram, and it won't live across the power cycle. If you want that configuration be "permanent", write it into on-board configuration flash chip.
Did you check with this short introduction: http://laurie.tech/start-fpga/ ?
I'm running Android Things on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. I want to read NFC Tags, is it possible to do this? I've got like zero hardware knowledge about this stuff. All I know is how to write the necessary code.
A Raspberry Pi (or the other Dev kit) does not have NFC hardware. If you want to read NFC tags you need to get some hardware.
In addition to that, there is not user space driver for NFC, so you'd need to read it using a driver.
I only know of 2 chips that are sort of supported, both drivers are very limited. In fact, the simplest way to get them to work is to plug then into an Arduino and then communicate with the Arduino either using UART or I2C.
The best supported chip is RC-522. It reads mifare, but not sure how many other formats. You have a driver ported from arduino here: http://github.com/Galarzaa90/android-things-rc522
One of the important limitations is that it does not support card emulation.
I've had success with the ACR122U running over USB. It supports Mifare.
I intend to pursue this course from Free-Electrons (https://free-electrons.com/training/embedded-linux/) as a self-learner. They use Atmel SAMA5D3 Xplained board. My question is: can I use Raspberry Pi 3 instead of the Atmel board for completing the labs? If yes, would it be too much effort for someone who is almost a newbie in this field?
A comparison between the two boards can be found here (in Italian): http://www.campana.vi.it/blog/confronto-raspberry-pi3-beaglebone-black-sama5d3-xplained/. Rasp Pi3 seems to win in almost every respect, except for the number of GPIO pins and the price of Pi is around £30 vs £79 for Atmel (checked today). I'd really love it if the Pi could be used for this course.
Thanks in advance for any help.
As sawdust stated, the main parts that will differ are the u-boot and kernel labs because they are specific to the SoC and board. They may not be so easy to adapt. The main issue is that they are all about getting a system booting on the platform so the followings labs depend on them.
The buildroot lab will differ a bit because of the different SoC but is way easier to adapt. Also, you won't be able to do the "Filesystems - Flash file systems" lab at all because the RPi doesn't have any NAND flash. That is one of the main reason why we are using the SAMA5D3 Xplained.
I am planing to spend few days a week writing a driver for a Greenpacket USB WiMax modem. Greenpacket only provides Windows driver with it and as I am fond of Linux and Mac I feel very bad not having driver for them.
I have experience writing C++ programs so I think it won't be hard for me. Even I like C++ programming very much. I have never written drivers but I know some concepts. I have PDF of the device specification from the company's website.
I would like to ask if I can write driver with that provided specifications? If yes what would be my starting point assuming I would like to write it for MAC first and then Linux. I am reading this article right now but your experiences would be of great help.
The product specifications sheet does not provide enough data to write a device driver. You are going to need low-level information about how to speak with the WiMax device via USB. You are probably also way out of your depth of you think a product sheet is enough information to write a device driver.
My company is trying to build a pcb with an obsolete xilinx fpga (XC3042A) which is part of the XC3000 series chips. Does anyone have any experience programming the data to the chip? I'm looking for what software, hardware, etc. people have used.
I have programmed old Xilinx chips (XC4010XL) using a custom built interface to the ISA bus.
I used Turbo-C on a DOS box and a home-made ISA card with '245 (bidir transceiver) and a 74LS74 (dual flip flop D) for strobe signals on a slave parallel configuration.
It is not difficult to implement the same using a parallel port, for instance.
You should be able to find the programming specs from the Xilinx website. They provide documentation on the different methods used in programming their FPGA. It should be in their AppNotes. They have several modes - typically slave serial or select map (parallel). That means some sort of SPI flash, or parallel flash, or JTAG.
If you look around, you may find schematics for a DIY programming cable too! You can also interface a small micro, say a 8-bit PIC to handle the programming specs while you design your own custom interface to it or interface it to a SD card or something else.
The current Xilinx tools and cables will program old parts.
The XC3000 series does not use the JTAG interface, so you can not use the Xilinx programmer to download your configuration.
You can do so by either using an external EPROM or an embedded processor to download the code.
Take a look at this applications note from Xilinx:
http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/application_notes/xapp090.pdf
For daisy chain:
http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/application_notes/xapp091.pdf
It describes the data format as well as signal info for downloading the configuration file to the FPGA.
You can use older version of the Xilinx programmer from their web site and configure the devices, I believe the last version of the xilinx supporting the 3000 series was version 8 but I am not sure.
Check out FTDI. You might be able to convince them to go with some updated hardware. It's currently $150 CAD for USB + FPGA, and $80 CAD extra if you bundle it with a Manual. Plus shipping.
It even supports the free web kit available from the Xilinx website.