Dreamplug Jtag For Mac
Posted : admin On 25.09.201925 February 2012 Anil Madhavapeddy tags: plugcomputer, ocaml, and dreamplug I’ve been meaning to play with for some time now, as I need a low-power embedded system around the house. I recently bought a (a pretty powerful Intel CPU, that even has VT support), but had annoying getting it working reliably. I ordered an ARM-based as an alternative (and as a bonus, the Dreamplug is 6x cheaper than the Soekris!). Here are my notes on getting it to work. Requirements:. Aside from the Dreamplug itself, make sure you order the optional JTAG module.
This provides a serial console that is essential to getting any development done with it. I also grabbed the extra 16GB Class 10 SLC SD Card, to act as my home directory. You will also need another functional system running Debian (or a VM on your Mac; whatever is easiest). The JTAG drivers for the USB serial are easiest to get running on Linux.
Connect DreamPlug with 4-wire cable to the JTAG board. Corresponding connectors on DreamPlug and JTAG board are labeled 'UART'. Make sure JTAG board is in UART-mode (check Dip switch on the JTAG board's top). Connect JTAG board with USB cable to a USB port of your PC. You will also need a PC (Windows, UNIX or MAC) that has Wifi support. In its initial state the options for connecting to the Dreamplug are Wifi or the serial JTAG.
The Dreamplug arrived with a working installation, but running the absolutely ancient Debian Lenny. A dist-upgrade through to Wheezy led to bricking it almost immediately, and so I did a fresh installation from scratch. For a fresh installation, place a USB stick of suitable size (greater than 2GB is best) into your functional Debian installation. Then:. The Marvell bootloader boots from a VFAT partition, so you will need two partitions. The first should be a small fat16 (I picked 150MB) and the remainder an ext3 partition for Linux itself.
There are good instructions available on the wiki which show you how to do this. I grabbed the latest kernel (at this time, 3.2.7) from, and installed it with the following commands (assuming your USB stick is /dev/sdb). $ sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt $ sudo cp uImage /mnt $ sudo umount /mnt. You now need to use debootstrap to install a fresh root image. Because it is ARM and your main PC is probably an x86, you will need to setup the QEMU CPU emulator. An extremely cool feature of QEMU is that it can do of foreign binaries, so you can chroot directly into the ARM filesystem and run commands as if they were x86.
The qemu-deboostrap command will take care of this for you, if you perform the steps below (again, assuming your USB stick is /dev/sdb). $ sudo apt-get install qemu-user-static debootstrap $ sudo mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt $ sudo mkdir -p /mnt/usr/bin $ sudo cp /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static /mnt/usr/bin/ $ sudo qemu-debootstrap -arch =armel wheezy. Now grab the kernel modules from the same place as your uImage (for 3.2.7, from ). Then, chroot into your fresh installation and untar them. $ cd /mnt $ sudo tar -zxvf /sheeva-3.2.7-Modules.tar.gz $ sudo chroot /mnt $ depmod -a # edit /etc/network/interfaces # edit /etc/resolv.conf.
Dreamplug Jtag For Mac Pc
The wireless setup involves some extremely crap firmware which relentlessly kernel panicked for me, so I just disabled it by adding the following to /etc/modprobe.d/dpwifiap.conf, as I only want wired access: blacklist libertas blacklist libertassdio. From there on, put the USB stick into the Dreamplug, and follow the rest of the boot instructions from the to interact with the Marvell BIOS and boot from the USB stick. I copied the contents of the USB stick onto the internal MicroSD, and it all boots standalone now. OCaml on ARM One of the reasons I wanted an ARM-based setup is to experiment with the OCaml native code generation. Has been doing some excellent work on for embedded systems, including support for 16-bit Thumb code, exception backtraces, and dynamic linking and profiling. Once Linux was up and running, compiling up the latest ocaml-trunk was straightforward.
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential git $ git clone svn-trunk $ cd ocp-ocaml $./configure && make world opt opt.opt install This compiles the bytecode and native code compilers, and then compiles them again using the native code generator. This takes a while to do on the poor little ARM CPU. Once that finished, I compiled up a few simple modules and they worked great!
Dreamplug Jtag For Mac Mac
Since the trunk of OCaml is a development branch, you may run into a few packaging issues (use the very latest OASIS to regenerate any setup.ml, and you will need a small patch until is applied). Incidentally, if anyone is interested in working on a port to ARM as an internship in the, do get in touch with me ← ↑ → Please enable JavaScript to view the.