Sunday, March 2, 2014

MSP430-Based AT89LP6440 Programmer

Using an FTDI cable to program the AT89LP6440 like I mentioned in my last post turned out to be more difficult than I expected. Configuring the FT232 chip is a real pain because the reset command in the API does not seem to actually reset any of the chip settings to default. After trying some more tweaking I noticed that the uploading itself inexplicably hangs sometimes on longer files. I was not able to finish the next step of the microcontroller comparison. According to another page, FTDI states that "using bitbanging for SPI or I2C is not recommended with the FT232RL part."

The next step was to use an MSP430 to take data in over UART and relay it over SPI to the AT89LP6440. The UART interface of the DS89C450 works really well so I copied this. The MSP430 gives a prompt over UART that can be used to erase the chip, load or verify firmware, and set flags. The challenge of the project was coordinating interrupts and ring buffers for the hardware UART and SPI peripherals so that no data is missed. At 9600 baud it worked reliably but at higher speeds there were checksum errors because sometimes the previous UART byte was not read before the next one came in. This seems to happen at the end of a line of hex when the MSP430 has to send a lot of data out over SPI to prepare the chip for writing. The solution was to send an XOFF character back to the terminal, which stops it from sending any more data bytes until an XON character is sent. Like this I can program at 57.6k and after a few dozen tries I have not had any errors writing to the chip or verifying the firmware. The MSP430 is also connected to the reset line of the AT89LP6440 so that I can put the chip in run mode without having to press any buttons on the breadboard.

The source for the programmer can be found here: AT89 Programmer.


3 comments:

  1. Hi, I'm trying to use your code to program an AT89LP6440 with MSP430 and can't seem to make it work. Do you have an Email so I can contact you?
    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi! Sure, I would be glad to help. Send me your email address through the contact form on the right and I will get in touch with you. Thanks for reading.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi thanks for the quick reply, I've managed to make it work.
    Thanks again :)

    ReplyDelete