20120713

AT91SAM9260-EK restored!

Quite some time ago, I received a AT91SAM9260-EK board from Atmel.  I tried to turn it on at the time, and it looked dead.  I put it on the shelf and got busy with other things: new jobs, a divorce, a new marriage, a son, and a new house.

Recently, I became interested in the Atmel SoCs again (Atmel's open source group recently gave me some hardware to evaluate some work).  I took this board out of the closet and it seemed dead.  But one night I had the serial port connected and noticed that the ROM recovery program printed something.  I tried to download things with my old AT91RM9200 spi recovery program, but that didn't work.  I tried running Atmel's SAM-BA on FreeBSD, but it couldn't communicate with the board.  I tried using openocd with SAM-ICE.  Sadly, the board was wired for ICE, not JTAG and the instructions for doing the conversion online didn't work.  Finally, in an act of desperation I installed Ubuntu in as a Virtual Machine image.  With that, it worked.

So now, I have new shiny to play with that should already be supported by FreeBSD so I can make sure that I'm not breaking any at91sam9 support with my recent changed.

No comments: