Messages

1

SIMpad forum / Killed My Swisscom Cl4 Using Jtag.

« on: January 04, 2006, 08:15:07 pm »

Hi Berend,

I'm wondering though, you mention you build an image with new CL4 params. Would it be possible to make it available somewhere? My attempts to set up OE/Monotone have been less than succesful. I know I just have to put some more time in but I'm not sure it's worth the hassle and setting up OE really seems like that..On the other hand --with everything you documented here at the forum, thanks about that-- I'l probably try again in a few weeks.
[div align=\"right\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

before I forget it, you can find the latest opie Image I build on:
[a href=\"http://www-user.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~gerkhard/simpad/opie-image-simpad-cl4.rootfs.jffs2]http://www-user.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~gerkhard/s...l4.rootfs.jffs2[/url]

Actually I'm quite eager to know wether it works, since it's not very likely, that
I will by an CL4 again (and I will probably have to wait a few month before I have
time to buy and configure an SL4 pad).

If I find time, I will place some more detailed information about this image in the
corresponding parent directory.
Roughly I have used the openembedded repositiory of ca 20.12.05 for building
an opie-image and modified machines/simpad.conf for 16 MB flash and
an 24-8 ram / ramdisk configuration.

Ofcourse I cannot give any guarantee that this works, since I have never tested it,
but it looks like this is the only currently available opensimad 0.9.0 image for an
CL4, so if anybody tries it, please report your results here.

regards
       Sascha

2

SIMpad forum / Killed My Swisscom Cl4 Using Jtag.

« on: December 27, 2005, 02:22:30 pm »

Hi,

since flashing the hh.org bootloader on my swissom cl4 did not
work, we tried to fix this using jtag.
It seems that we have found a subtle way to finally kill the
simpad.

The primary problem, while trying to jtag the pad, was that
the jtag software didn't detect the self soldered cable.

After verifying all soldered connections we figured three possible
sources for our problems:
    1. My brother-in-law used  higher rated resistors for the jtag
       cable, since he had no correct resistors at hand.
    2. Basically the mainboard layout could have been altered,
        so that jtag would not work anymore, even though the soldering
        points are still available. Since jtag is no official feature
        and it is usually only used during development, it might
        be possible, that the swisscom pads don't support it anymore.
    3. Some specific problem with our simpad.

While  fumbling around we realised, that the bootloader was starting
even if the jtag cable was connected.
My brother-in-law was a little bit astonished, since he expected, that
the jtag cable should keep the processor permanently in reset state.
Later on he guessed, that it might also be possible, that the jtag
interface only blocks the cpu from interaction with other peripherals.
Somehow I proposed to enforce this reset state by pressing the
reset button while the jtag cable was connected.
We later on guessed that this was the trick to kill the simpad, since
some minutes later we realised, that the cpu started to get really
hot (i.e. hot enough to burn your fingers). Furthermore the
boot messages started to get messed up (i.e. most text was
undecipherable due to strange symbols, just a few strings
remained readable) and finally the simpad didn't boot at all
anymore.

We later on figured, that the strongarm processor provides two
separate reset logics and my brother-in-law remembered, that
he had already damaged another device by triggering two reset
logics simultaneously before.
Since in this other case only a reset IC was killed, we started looking
for such an IC but we have not succeded yet and it might be even
possible, that the reset logic is not driven by an IC but just by an
RC component.

So it looks like we have really bricked the simpad, but we are not
really sure why and furhtermore we still don't know, why the
jtag cable was not detected.
My brother-in-law said, that the resistors for the jtag cable, where
technically unnecessary, but we didn't have the possibility to test
this simplified jtag cable, since we killed the pad before.

The interesting question is wether someone can verify, that the
jtag process works on swisspads.

And ofcourse if we really cannot fix the pad, the question arises
wether it is possible to somehow make use of the simpad screen
as a display. For this we would probably need a controller or at
least some specifications to program a controller, but currently
we have not yet found a model number or any other information
about the display, even the manufacturer is unclear.

So if anybody has informations about the last point, this would be quite
helpfull. On the other hand, if somebody has a simpad with a broken
display we could either buy the mainboard or sell our display.

regards
         Sascha

3

SIMpad forum / Bootloader Problem, Is My Cl4 Bricked?

« on: December 27, 2005, 01:18:04 pm »

As far as I have read in this forum several people in this
forum have managed to get bootloader running on a cl4,
so how did you do that?

I'm pretty sure I took the same route (among others).

I've just tried it again and this works fine:
upgrade from tsp_hpc2000eng (the original image I believe) to blupdater.img:
 - serload blupdater.img and reset
 - penguin on screen, installs new bootldr
 - reset after msg on screen, screen fades away ugly, reset again
 - boot promp now shows on serial, no response to input/no echo
 - restart minicom, works fine now

from my experience the flashing of the bootloader doesn't give any problems on a CL4 as long as
you stay away from the update releases (2.5.3, ...) when you're already using the HH.orgs bootldr.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=108550\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

I think the only difference to my attempt seems to be, that I started from an opensimpad 0.8.1
with a booloader verison 2.5.1 instead for directly form wince (which would have been
a german version anyway).
The only problem was that I could not enter anything on the boot prompt, so the
bootloader seemed to run fine up to this point.
We tried to fix this using jtag, but it looks like we finally managed to kill the simpad
on a hardware basis (i.e. no reaction at all and the strongarm gets burning hot...).

Interestingly I have found a thread on the old opensimpad forum, where somebody
claims, that he has succesfully flashed the 2.5.3 bootloader on an CL4, so maybe
this would have been the better way.

Thanks for your help anyway.

      Sascha

P.S. I'll post some more information about the jtag trouble in a separate thread.

4

SIMpad forum / Newbie Questions: 1. Hardware

« on: December 27, 2005, 01:05:24 pm »

Hi Jonathan,

most of my problems have been solved now, since we have killed the
simpad during christmas :-(

2. The three missing chips are 74LCX16245 (i think in a TSSOP package). But you use a further
chip the MIC2562A-1BM  PCMCIA PowerController. At least you need a PCMCIA connector which
match the given footprint (i think your sister will kill you when she has to solder a non matching 50
pin connector to the Simpad board).
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=108598\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Since we guessed, that only an IC, that controls the reset process might
be killed, I looked up some of the ICs on the mainboard. If I am remembering
correctly I have stumbled upon an chip, which was a controller for pcmcia,
so maybe, this chip is not missing. Since don't have access to the simpad
I cannot check this, but probably I will have to buy a new pad anyway and
in this case I will by a SL4.
But thanks for your help anyway.

Sascha

P.S. We guessed the IC type right, thus the price is <3 euros per IC.

5

SIMpad forum / Bootloader Problem, Is My Cl4 Bricked?

« on: December 22, 2005, 09:59:18 pm »

Hi,

after fumbling around with oe and bitbake I finally managed to build
an opie-imag, that is small enough (< 16mb) and hopefully provides
the correct kernel command line (i.e. parittion definitions for 16 MB flash).
But as it turns I could even flash this image due to bootloader problems.

Since Documentation about any bootloader and 16 MB simpads seems
to be non-existent I had the following choices.

Install bloader.2.5.3 from opensimpad.org, which is specifically labelled
as not compatibel with cl4  

or

directly flash blupdater.img without erasing flash before.

I decided to try the last version, it looks like this was a failure.

The bootloader boots as expected and after an unsuccesfull
attempt to flash an img from cf (hda1) falls back to a prompt.
So far this is OK and expected, the problem is that the
prompt is not reacting to any inputs, effectively making
it impossible to do anything (esp. flashing something over
serial).

I have no Idea what to try now, besides using JTAG or soldering
an pcmcia slot, so that I can place a flash image on /hda1.

For neither of the two options I have the necessary hardware at hand.

Even worse I have still no idea, what went wrong, respectively how
to do it right.

If not erasing the flash was the source of the problem, then
I would have to install the 2.5.3 bootloader, which sounds not
like something that could work. But if this was not the problem,
what else can go wrong (the blupdater.img file is OK and
serial upload seemed to work).

As far as I have read in this forum several people in this
forum have managed to get bootloader running on a cl4,
so how did you do that?

       Sascha

6

SIMpad forum / Newbie Questions: 3. Openembedded

« on: December 21, 2005, 09:37:27 am »

Hi,

the sid monotone deb did not work correctly (probably due to wrong libs) but
the sarge deb did the trick.
So now I have a working (and succesfully updated) oe reposistory.

I think downloading the database snapshot should be the preffered way,
to set up a new repository, given that the installed monotone version
is new enough to handle the snapshot. In my case downloading and
updating the repository just took a few minutes, whereas I gave up
on my attempt to directly pull the oe repository. Still the monotone
error message in case of an outdated version is a bit hard to interpret!

I'm now trying to build again, I hope that at least the problems for
the task-bootstrap target were just temporary.

           Sascha

7

SIMpad forum / Newbie Questions: 3. Openembedded

« on: December 21, 2005, 07:24:44 am »

Hi,

I just manually installed the newest monontone deb from
verge.net/monotone and this solved the oe.db problem.

I guess the missing key means, that the missing database scheme
stems from the newest monotone version, thus for using
the oe.db snapshots, one has to install at least the version that
was used by the creator of the snapshot...

Drawback of this solution is, that the monotone deb seems to be
somewhat broken, since it requires libboost version > 1.33.0-1
but only 1.33.0c2a is currently available via apt-get (i.e. without
special entrys in sources.list).
Since it seems to work anyway, I'm going to ignore this.

       Sascha

8

SIMpad forum / Newbie Questions: 3. Openembedded

« on: December 21, 2005, 07:04:35 am »

Hi,

just some further informations regarding monotone.
I just figured that I overlooked the original renaming advice
in the oe wiki, but renaming OE.db to oe.db did not
help anyway. The resulting error message is:

monotone --db=oe.db checkout --branch=org.openembedded.dev
monotone: misuse: database schemas do not match: wanted 1509fd75019aebef5ac3da3a5edf1312393b70e9, got bd86f9a90b5d552f0be1fa9aee847ea0f317778b. try migrating database

So whats wrong here?


            Sascha

P.S. My monotone version is monotone
0.23 (base revision: e32d161b8d5cde9f0968998cc332f82f82c27006)
which I installed via Debian apt-get (it is from unstable)

9

SIMpad forum / Newbie Questions: 3. Openembedded

« on: December 21, 2005, 12:40:38 am »

Hi,

I recently bought a simpad cl4 and after
some struggling with the hardware and the
old opensimpad release (see my other two threads),
I am now trying to build opensimpad using
openembedded.

This ofcourse also raised some Questions / Problems,
most of which I have not resolved yet.

Concerning Monotone:
    I tried to pull the repository, after 3 days
    and several interruptions due to 404s, I gave
    up. This raises two Questions:
       
        1. How long should pulling the repository
            normally take (I have a 3 Mbit DSL connection)
        2. If monotone breaks due to 404, does a
            new call restart it from the beginning
            or does it continue from the last stop?
           

    I also tried to grab the OE.db.bz2 database
    snapshot, but monotone complained about
    an incompatibility (I think it concerned
    the database version) and threw two hashkeys
    (I think that is monotones replacement for a
    version number). I also tried to migrate
    the db, but this resulted in the same error.
    Finally I settled with a direct snapshot
    of the source and skipped monotone.
   
    After I started the build process, I found
    somewhere the warning to rename the OE.db
    file to oe.db. I dont want to test this
    currently, to avoid interferences with the
    build process.
    But these questions remain.
   
        Would renaming OE.db to oe.db resolve the
        above compatibility problem and if yes,
        why?
        On the other hand if this is not the
        solution, how can I make use of these
        database snapshots?
       
Concerning Bitbake:
    In the local.conf file I had to alter the line
    CVS_TARBALL_STASH = "http://www.oesources.org/source/current"
    to
    CVS_TARBALL_STASH = "http://www.oesources.org/source/"
    Is this normal / correct ?
   
And now for the hard part, which I have just started with.
Building:
   
    How do I specify the hardware specs of my simpad.
    In local.conf I can only specify to build opensimpad.
   
    ------------------------------------------------------------
   
    Should I alter settings in /conf/distro/opensimpad-0.9.0.conf ?
   
    ------------------------------------------------------------
   
    Furthermore after starting bitbake, it seems that
    srcs get pulled from the net, for some modules this produced
    404s but didn't stop building immediately.
    But now I got the message that building failed:
       
        NOTE: package module-init-tools-3.2-pre9-r0: task do_fetch: failed
        ERROR: TaskFailed event exception, aborting
        NOTE: package module-init-tools-3.2-pre9: failed
        ERROR: Build of task-bootstrap failed
       
    Anyway to fix this, or should I just wait?
   
    Last but not least I concluded from some threads here,
    that the patches for mmc and bluetooth were already included
    into the openembedded, thus
   
    -------------------------------------------------------------
        how do I acitvate the mmc-module, or do I have to compile it by hand.
     --------------------------------------------------------------
   
So far for now, I fear that I will stumple upon a some more questions
during the next days, so I appreciate any help.

    Sascha

10

SIMpad forum / Newbie Questions: 2. Opensimpad

« on: December 21, 2005, 12:36:20 am »

Hi,

I recently bought a Swisscom pad (actually a simpad cl4),
more details about the hardware can be found in my previous
thread.

When trying to install the last official opensimpad version
(i.e. 0.8.1) I ran in to a lot of problems, which were
mainly due to unprecise or lack of documentation.

First off some installation instructions refer to buttons
by letters (at least r and f), but I have not found
any documentation for the association between these
letters and the actual keys on my simpad (maybe
the swisscom pads are labelled differently from
normal simpads?).

------------------------------------------------------
So is there any common letter key association for simpads?
------------------------------------------------------

I decided to use the key with the small rectangle and
interpreted reset as the r key, this seemed to work.

The next problem is the advise to erase
the flash before installing. According to the
docs this requires a booloader >= 2.5.3, but the latest
version available for small cl4 models is 2.5.1, thus
it is not possible to erase the flash.

I decided to skip this step, though the docs, explicitly
warn because of non immediate problems that might result,
the question is still:

------------------------------------------------------
What is the correct way to flash opensimpad on a
cl4 simpad, can I use the sl4 bootloader or is an
cl4 version of this booloader available?
------------------------------------------------------

Finally I want to use part of the ram as a ram disk.
For this purpose I found appropriate kernel images,
but there is no instruction about what to do with it.

--------------------------------------------------
I guess I can simply flash the kernel images like I flashed
the initrd... image, but I'd like to have a confirmation
before I do this.
---------------------------------------------------

By the way, it is not quite clear to me wether it is
possible to write to flash with the 0.8.1 release.
I concluded from some remarks here, that writing
to flash is not possible from within linux
(I think jffs2 would be necessary).
Despite this I could store a few MB on my simpad
and I had the impression that the files were
stored in the flash ram.


So since I have to patch my kernel for the mmc slot and
I'd also like to be able to write to the flash
I decided, to try to build my own images
(see next thread), thus these questions will hopefully be
not to important for me anymore, but answers are still
interesting and might helper other people who bought
the swisspad.

regards
    Sascha
   
P.S. I found some Siemens internal informations on emule,
that state, that the flash ram is only specified for
1000 flash cycles, thus it might not really be a good
idea to use it via a file system anyway....

11

SIMpad forum / Newbie Questions: 1. Hardware

« on: December 21, 2005, 12:29:31 am »

Hi,

I recently bought a simpad with the intent to abuse it as
a cheap, flexible, big, high-resolution digital picture frame.
(Currently commercially available image picture frames have cga to vga
resolution and cost > 200 Euros...)

I am probably not a total newbie, since I use openzaurus on my
zaurus since some monthes, and I use Linux since ~ 10 years.
Despite this I stumbled across a lot of problems and questions
most of which I have not resolved yet.

Instead of solving this by try and error on my own, I will try
to put all or at least most of my questions and observations
here, in the hope that I will get some answers and the corresponding
threads will end up collecting the most relevant informations
concerning opensimpad on cl4.

To restrict my posts and the collected problems to a moderate size
I will split my Questions into 3 separate Threads
concerning Simpad Hardware, Opensimpad prebuilt versions and finally
building opensimpad using openembedded.

So far now for the hardware topics.

I think my biggest "failure" was, that I decided, that for my digital
picture frame 32 MB ram an 16 MB flash would be enough.
Thus I went for the cheaper CL 4 or to be more precise for the
swisscom ScreenPad Top WP50@ISDN, which  an ebay trader currently
sells very cheap on ebay.de.
Ofcourse I completely missed the point, that the small versions
also lack the pcmcia slot, which I planned to use for a flash card reader
in a first step. Besides this opensimpad seems to be poorly supported
/ documentend for this version as I recently figured (see my next thread).

Since I always bought the simpad with the idea of adding an sd slot
in mind, I decided to immediately attack my simpad with a soldering iron.

After opening the simpad I immediately realized, that soldering this
is probably rather difficult for an untrained person like me, so
this was not so obvious for me from the webpage.
Luckily my sister and her husband are both electrical engineers, so
I simply passed the simpad to them and they soldered in an sd slot.

This also let us to investigate another point, that had come to my
mind after seeing the missing pcmcia slot.

----------------------------------------------------------

Ofcourse my question is wether it is possible to add the missing
pcmcia slot?

----------------------------------------------------------

By comparing my simpad to images of the sl4 from the internet
I figured that besides the actual slot, it seems that only
three more ICs are missing.
The problem was figuring the number of these ics.
I think we found the correct number (so I have the number
not at hand atm) and the corresponding chips seem to
be bus drivers (im not quite sure if this is the correct
technical term...) which would coust around 3 Euro per piece.

Soldering them is probably not easy, but surely easier
then desoldering and soldering new ram chips.
(Actually my sister and her husband were rather
impressed, that some of you guys were able to desolder
a ram chip from a dimm module and resolder it into
the simpad without breaking it by overheating...)

------------------------------------------------------

So this now raises two Questions:
   
    1. Has anybody already done this, i.e. adding a pcmcia a slot to CL4?
    2. What is printed on the 3 missing chips?

------------------------------------------------------
   
The last Question is basically for verification purposes, the
3 identicall ICs missing on my CL4 are positioned immediately
below the card slot (i.e. below the flash chips) and the missing
pcmcia slot, they have approx. 50 pins.

Another point that came to my mind, so it is probably not usefull
for me, is, wether it might be possible to use the dect and sd
functionality alternatingly.
Basically the Idea is, that the SD-slot, does not close any
new circuits, as long as no card is inserted, on the other
hand, I concluded from one description on the internet, that
the dect module can be switched on and off on a hardware basis,
which itself can be controlled by apm events.

---------------------------------------------------------

Thus it might be possible to use sd by switching off dect
and dect while no sd-card is inserted or am I wrong?

---------------------------------------------------------

Still I don't think my picture frame needs a dect module,
so if someone needs a dect module, I have a spare one.


Finally one question concerning wlan:
   
    Is it possible to add wlan funcionality without
    adding the pcmcia slot?
   
I guess the answer is no, since the trick with the
bluetooth modules seems to be, that they can be
accessed in a serial mode.
But maybe this works also for those sd-wlan modules?


So far for the hardware questions, which are actually
least important for me at the moment, but I think
it gives a good starting point for the next
questions.

regards
    Sascha