The Virtual Cogs guys have done a superb job creating a Linux kernel image for the VCMX212. So far I've been reluctant to delve into Linux remote source level debugging. Although it is looking increasingly likely that I should switch over to it soon. As such I've been happily delving into creating apps using the uMon API. But it has it's shortfalls;
A few weeks back someone asked on the Virtual Cogs Google group about accessing the miniSD card on the VC21BR1 board not from Linux. Something I had been looking at last year. If you boot into Linux on the VCMX212, the kernel mounts and supports the SD card. But no other support is available outside Linux, sounds like a challenge :) This was something that I wanted to get implemented myself. So I took up the mantle..
At first it looked like a daunting proposition to implement the driver. As usual I google'd as far as I could to work out what others had done before. Most of the searching pointed at setting up an SPI based SD/MMC card driver. Which was confusing at first, considering the i.MX21 processor on the VCMX212 has built in SD Host Controller circuity.
Obtaining the required documentation was quite easy. Here's some links to the pertinant docs;
http://www.sdcard.org/about/memory_card/pls/Simplified_Physical_Layer_Spec.pdf
http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~amitra/sdcard/ProdManualSDCardv1.9.pdf
http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/ref_manual/MC9328MX21RM.pdf
http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/app_note/AN2906.pdf
http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/app_note/AN3049.pdf
Using the i.MX21 SDHC on-chip module ended up being quite straight forward. Quite quickly I was sending SD commands to the card and getting responses back. Late on a Friday night during that first week of development the card sent back it's CID and CSD structures. I.e. it said 'Hello, my name is ...' :) After that was cracked, the rest progressed nicely. Slowly due to busy life etc. but certainly shaping up.
After a few weeks of the odd evening and weekend work I finally managed to get the code into a usable state. Posting my results onto the Virtual Cogs Google group;
So here's where I have got to so far;
Card Initialization;
This has been working great with Sandisk 16MB and Sandisk 1GB microSD cards. Support has been added to detect MMC, SD, SDHC, and SDIO. Only the SD path has been tested. I don't have access to a SDHC or SDIO card, so that needs further testing. Plus I don't think MMC cards fit into the VC21BR1 microSD slot, so don't envisage further work on the MMC path. I'm hoping that at least the SDHC path is correct.
Read/Write;
Single block read/write (no interrupts or DMA) has been tested in isolation. Writing 128 single blocks of test patterns works, and they can be read back correctly. Support has been added to loop across multiple blocks, but that hasn't been tested. SDHC card (and 4 bit bus) support has been added but not tested.
uMon FATFS/DOSFS;
Using the latest version of uMon (v1.15), cf functions have been added that hook into the SD init, read, and write functions. CF can initialize the SD card and provided the function hooks to DOSFS. FATFS can then be used to ls, cat, and get a file from the SD card into TFS. I came across problems using rm, qry, and put FATFS commands. put command seemed to work, but Windows (XP and Vista) complained that the file was corrupt :S So I tried a different route to test the SD init, read, and write functions...
EFSL (Embedded Filesystems Library);
I grabbed the latest stable CVS version of EFSL (v0.2.9), and updated it with Martin Thomas's upgrades (see link below). Then dropped in support for VCMX212. A simple uMon API based test program using this EFSL library, can read a text file from the SD card, and write out a copy of the file contents to a new file on the SD card. Windows can read this new text file back from the SD card :)
EFSL - http://efsl.be/
Martin's changes - http://www.siwawi.arubi.uni-kl.de/avr_projects/arm_projects/efsl_arm/index.html
4 comments:
Hello,
Could you possibly help me to find some documentation on the VC21 robotics COG? The company have gone bust and their website is down, but I have one of their boards that I'd like to program. I'd be really grateful if you could email some information to me.
Thanks in advance,
Dave
Hi Dave,
I couldn't find a way to email you directly, so I hope that you see this reply :)
At the start of this year, a few of us with COGs set up a new Google group to collect information (documents, wiki pages, source code, etc) we all had on the COGs.
The link is; http://groups.google.com/group/virtual-cogs
One file to have a look into is the vcrb1-i2c.zip It is the original example code by Virtual COGs to demonstrate i2c comms between the main board and the robot cog.
Hope that helps?
Cheers, Richard.
PS: The old groups is still at; http://groups.google.com/group/virtualcogs
Richard, you're an absolute star. Thanks again for all your help :o)
Which programming environment do you use?
you can email me at d.walker(at)zepler.org to go "off-line" if you like
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