NetBurner Community Forum

Paul,

I thought I'd start another thread rather than digress the NANO thread further. We are coming to the completion of a rather sizable design project using the MOD5270. My two biggest concerns I have with it are the Flash space and clock speed for what we need it to scale to.

The MOD54415 sounds like a great solution though. All the Flash I can dream of and a huge bump in clock speed. What is the compatability issues of upgrading a MOD5270 design to a MOD54415 design? Any chance they are relatively plugin compatible?

Thanks.
Scott

Plug in compatible is the design goal.
In general it should work, a lot will depend on exactly what you are trying to do.

The issues as I see it will be:

1)analog pins not available as GPIO.
So the 8 analog pins J2 6..13 ARE NOT available as GPIO.
You can probably use them as inputs and two (9,13) of them can be programmed
to be DAC outputs, so you might get by if you need these as GPIO.


2)SPI drivers.
We have written an SPI driver to talk to the SD card, and there is an additional micro SD card on the
board it self. If you are talking to external SPI devices other than these your driver code will
need to be re-writen as the SPI system on the 54415 is completely different.
Also since the board now supports two fsimultanious SD cards there is a very slight modification to the file initialization code.

3)Other hardware drivers... ie initializing chip selects, setting up external interrupts etc...
These will require a little bit of work.

4)You may never ever have to use the serial port to recover from bad code again!
When I was working on the Ethernet debugger driver I wrote a lot of code that just crashed or hung.
I added a button wired to the restore configuration jumper and it was really nice to hit that button
with reset and boot into the alternate monitor that supports auto update!
So even when I was writing whacky crashing system level code I never had to do a serial download! Joy oh Joy!

4)You may never ever have to use the serial port to recover from bad code again!
When I was working on the Ethernet debugger driver I wrote a lot of code that just crashed or hung.
I added a button wired to the restore configuration jumper and it was really nice to hit that button
with reset and boot into the alternate monitor that supports auto update!
So even when I was writing whacky crashing system level code I never had to do a serial download! Joy oh Joy!

Now that is a AWESOME idea!!!

That should be implemented on all devices if possible.

how is that finger implement?
is there a reference design somewhere?
we could probably add it as a daughter board.

What about using the Wifi module with the SPI bus? Is that supported? For that matter is there any ETA on the new Wifi card that has been long promised?

Thanks.
Scott

Here is a cell phone picture of a new NANO from the first production lot in the first prototype Nano carrier board....
We are now waiting on production carrier boards. The only problem I found was the carrier board din/dout were reversed on the
micro SD Card slot ;-( I fixed this and released the production carrier boards today....

I'm looking at the differences between the MOD5270 and the MOD54415.

Where are the D0-D15 lines? D16-D31 are on J1, but there don't appear to be any D0-D15 anymore. We do use those on the MOD5270 to go to an FPGA on our carrier board. I really want to try and rev to use the 54415 though.

Thanks.
Scott

The D0..D15 liens are either gpio or A/D on most platforms.
They were never really intended to be D0..D15 that was just what GPIO pins were availible on the MOD5270.

So the MOD5441X uses thoose pins as A/D.

The 16 bit buss is now dedicated and not shared with SDRAM so it should actually be faster....

Paul, when you stated:

4)You may never ever have to use the serial port to recover from bad code again!
When I was working on the Ethernet debugger driver I wrote a lot of code that just crashed or hung.
I added a button wired to the restore configuration jumper and it was really nice to hit that button
with reset and boot into the alternate monitor that supports auto update!
So even when I was writing whacky crashing system level code I never had to do a serial download! Joy oh Joy!

Did this stay in the current release, i did not see this in the documents for the Nano kit.

The restore is there....
Safe to set the boot delay to zero.

On the nano in the center near the connector end there are two gold pads....
Short them together and hit reset.... you will boot into the alternate app 115200 baud and config with DHCP.

The pad closest to the connector is actually ground,
So you can attach a to ground on your power source and just hold it to the other pad (The pad farthest from the connector)
when you hit reset... have to leave it there for about 3 seconds after reset.

If you remove it too quickly it will boot into the alternate monitor, but it will not override the config record with 115200 and DHCP mode.


Need to add all this info to the docs...

Paul