I had some success on the Surveyor this week.
I uploaded my own firmware.
The firmware that comes with the camera board is impressive. It has "commandline" interpreter, PicoC script interpreter, Blob detection, and Edge detection built in. But I needed to get blob centroids and a way to turn off the automatic color balance (which kept changing the colors of my green target to a pink target).
I downloaded the latest firmware; this includes:
source code
srv1.ldr.115K
(firmware configured for 115Kbps UART communication)
srv1.ldr.250K
(firmware configured for 232Kbps UART comm
using Matchport radio)
I figured that I should try to load the working, precompiled 115K firmware onto the board, before trying my own.
The user's forum described the process for loading the new firmware; seemed simple enough.
However, I can't seem to get it to load right. So now I erased perfectly good firmware off of my board, and couldn't get anything back on. D'oh!
Eventually, I found 2 pieces of information:
1) The Windows firmware loader that comes with Blackfin compiler, ldr.exe, only works with network connections. Oh. That was annoying, cuz it looked like ldr.exe was connecting properly. To connect using serial comm in Windows, you need ldrviewer.exe.
2) The new firmware is larger than 48K, this requires a two-stage process to put part in the L1 cache (very fast, but only 48K) and rest in SDRAM (slower, but bigger.) So I have to download an old copy of the firmware that is 42K. You load this into the L1 cache first. Then you can use Xmodem to load the new big firmware into the L1 & SDRAM.
There was a really good post to lay this out step by step.
Relief, now I felt good about compiling my own code and loading it up.
Make went okay, then I followed the process for loading the code.
I cycle power and, ... burp. A strange character shows up instead of the version number, then everything locks up.
I retried several times to no avail. I asked for help on the forum and all that I got was "it works for me" ug.
As it happens, I have been dreaming about this project all week with truly tortured sleep. So when I say the answer came to me in a dream, I think I earned it. As I have said before, everyone assumes that you purchased the Matchport radio. The radio uses 232Kbps serial communication. I just assumed that the firmware would default to 115K. So I go hunting around the source code and, tada:
baud = 232000;
\\ baud = 115200;
Duh! Everything HAD compiled and loaded right, but the camera was just talking too fast for hyperterm to understand.
Okay, I can now load my custom firmware code, whoop!
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