Wednesday 1 August 2012

Hackberry A10 update 1


Hackberry A10 available to buy from here . 


For the last few weeks I've been very busy mainly due to the interest in the board and more importantly debugging the hardware/software to determine what some of the missing connectors and solder points are for. Unfortunately one of the boards wasn't reporting the 1GB RAM and has to be sent back, so I'm only left with one board.



Well here's the progress so far, the serial port is located on the right above the power socket and hopefully the boards can be manufactured with the connector in place. I located two missing connector points for switches either side of the infra-red dectector. One turned out to be for a power down/up or sleep mode. The other is to force the board on boot up into FEL mode, having almost bricked my board a number times I was more than happy to find this. So now the board can easily be reflashed using Livesuit which I can confirm works. Next to the FEL recovery switch solder points are what look like solder points for a USB connector, unfortunately I haven't had time to test out if its active or not or whether the wifi board is using the USB port. Another plus point for the board is that most of the solder points easily accessible for soldering. Theres also some interesting connection points on the back of the pcb which I haven't explored yet!

The "Boot1" seems to be interesting as the USB ports are activated within "Boot1" as shown below,  I have a feeling that it should be possible to boot from the USB as well from SD card. When I can get sometime I will investigate this further as I think development must be done with the board some how connected to a PC instead of wearing the internal Flash away. Hopefully more news to follow.

HELLO! BOOT0 is starting!
boot0 version : .3.0
dram size =1024
Succeed in opening nand flash.
Succeed in reading Boot1 file head.
The size of Boot1 is 0x00036000.
The file stored in 0X00000000 of block 2 is perfect.
Check is correct.
Ready to disable icache.
Succeed in loading Boot1.
Jump to Boot1.
[       0.146] boot1 version : 1.3.1a
[       0.146] pmu type = 3
[       0.146] bat vol = 0
[       0.177] axi:ahb:apb=3:2:2
[       0.177] set dcdc2=1400, clock=1008 successed
[       0.179] key
[       0.191] no key found
[       0.191] flash init start
[       1.570] flash init finish
[       1.571] fs init ok
[       1.572] fattype FAT16
[       1.572] fs mount ok
[       1.578] script finish
[       1.580] power finish
[       1.584] BootMain start
[       1.584] 0
[       1.593] usbdc_vol = 4000, usbdc_cur = 0
[       1.593] usbpc_vol = 4000, usbpc_cur = 0
[       1.595] init to usb pc
[       1.598] set pc
[       1.601] key value = 0
[       1.603] recovery key high 6, low 4
[       1.607] unable to find fastboot_key key_max value
[       1.613] test for multi os boot with display
[       1.616] show pic finish
[       1.619] load kernel start
[       1.639] load kernel successed
[       1.639] start address = 0x4a000000
[       1.641] power exit detect
[       1.644] usb exit d







7 comments:

  1. Dear Jasbir, did both serial ports worked fine? My board has one of it not functional... :/

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    Replies
    1. Theres only one serial port, not sure where you think the other one is located?

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    2. My board is not EXACTLY the same as yours. The USB connector is double.

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    3. You can see a picture of it here [http://laboratoriosacme.net/wp/a10-board/]. The password is "A10".

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    4. This was something I was going to try and you have beaten me to it :). It seems the usb port is powered but not active. A10 chip only has 3 usb ports. 2 ports are already available through the double usb connector and I think the 3rd is used by the wifi board. I will confirm this with the manufacture. Thank you for trying this.

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  2. Hey there, do you have any idea what is the used for the 4 test points next to the CPU. And also all the other test points on the back of the PCB?

    On the front side next to the unpopulated usb there are 3 pints for another IR. Any idea where this pins are connected to the CPU?

    Regards,
    Paulo

    ReplyDelete