Hi People, I recently bought a Z8 Encore XP microcontrolled dev kit and I'm having proglems with establishing a connection with the board itself so I can program the Flash.
i'm using a USB smartcable/dongle to connect to the board but I'm having trouble finding setup documentation for jumper settings on the development board
Can anyone give a few pointers to relevant docs or directly help me?.
Please let us know how you went. Me and two mates bought those kits (the 8 pin ones) but we haven't had time to properly play around with them yet. It looks like a nice micro.
Hi People, I recently bought a Z8 Encore XP microcontrolled dev kit and I'm having proglems with establishing a connection with the board itself so I can program the Flash.
i'm using a USB smartcable/dongle to connect to the board but I'm having trouble finding setup documentation for jumper settings on the development board
Can anyone give a few pointers to relevant docs or directly help me?.
Geez, they sure don't make it easy, do they? Zilog's desperately trying to claw back market share, and this kind of needless problem is going to lose them lots of potential customers. Good luck with sorting through the mess. It'll be interesting to get your thoughts about the Encore once you can actually use the thing.
Will do Bob, at the moment the USB driver seems to install properly and so does the software, there's 11 jumpers that need to be set and the user's manual is referring to a differently numbered set of jumpers, possibly the difference between the 28 pin kit and the 8 pin kit. According to the readme there may be a CYGWIN/ZDSII program conflict, a USB conflict or some kind of jumper problem.
Ok the correct user manual is UM0187.pdf not UM0166. With a bit of eyeballing of the schematic and the jumper settings it all looks straightforward. The USB smartcable, if connected as per it's labels for the bottom side of each connector has a half twist in it which is not shown in the kit photos of it connected up so I'll have to check that out some more.
(Found the cable manual UM0181, which is not on the CDROM as stated) this states the connector stripe aligns with pin 1 on the connector: IOW with a half twist.
I've tried all of the README advice but I still can't get a connection yet, must be some software settings or something.
Zilog technical support sux. I'm still waiting for a response from them weeks after asking my question despite the automated email promising a response in 3-5 working days. Use the yahoo groups to get community support is much better. My XP kit is due to arrive next week so I can't help out till then. Regards, Dean.
You can easily lock up their ISP port making the chip useless in any serial programmer. Just what you need when you have a part soldered onto the board - real nasty. Their ATtiny26 device wasn't compatible with their own development system either - needed modifications, and wasn't adequately documented.
I certainly had a very unpleasant introduction to Atmels.
I had a response from Vinay (Bombay???) at Zilog telling me a set of jumper settings and sequence of settings for the software which is pretty much what I had after reading all the docs: there does seem to be some kind of problem here: I tried a second board and smart cable with exactly the same result: the software spots the cable ok but it gives a comms error when I try to program it. I'll try a second computer and see what happens.
Why is it that documentation seems to be the weak point with most brands of micros? The only doco I thought was excellent was for the old Motorola ones. I hope you can get the Encore working somehow. The actual device looks really nice, from what little I've read about it. Good luck!!
Yes, we've introduced the Encore into some of our new products mainly because we were very familiar with the Z8 otp products and it was an easier transition from existing assembler programs. I do like being able to directly address the complete register file on the Z8 in assembler but this is not an issue once writing in C. Looking back I wish we had changed to Atmel instead, it's got a lot of community support (avrfreaks), free C compiler and wide supply voltage range. Zilog technical support is no good and I hate trying to interface from 3.3 volts all the time. I'm now using Atmel for my own projects but the boss is reluctant to "introduce two technologies into the place". Dean
Thanks Colin, I'm checking out the Yahoo groups now and it seems to be a very common problem: some people have been able to get it to work by plugging in the USB cable first then the power cable.
Sounds like I was spoilt with Motorola micros: ocassionally you might get a corrupt config register but that's easily fixed. All you had to do was hook up power, a crystal and serial and they were ready to program.
G'day Mark, That's not so great. One of my mates who also bought one of the Zilog XP boards said he thought the USB cable was up to the 2.0 standard. Looks like he's in for a bit of a surprise. I might see if I can get mine doing something this long weekend, even if it's only the sample LED flashing code.
Hi again, I finally got around to installing the package on my XP machine. I plugged the USB adaptor into what I'm pretty sure is a USB 2.0 socket, installed the driver and it all worked OK. I changed the jumper settings to set up the "User" mode had a bit of a play with the ZDS, and managed to unintentionally overwrite the demo program in the micro with an example one which just blinks one LED, so it appears to all be working. I think I now have a rather steep learning curve to get used to the extra instructions and things on the chip. It's a bit hard to know what to do with an 8 pin micro.... I hope you can find out why your USB cables don't want to talk to your PCs. Once the ZDS is running, it all seems to work pretty well. Good luck. :)
Sanjay and Vinay of Zilog technical support tell me it's USB 2 compatible but according to Yahoo groups other people have had the same problem. I did a clean re-install on the uSB 2 machine but that did do it either. I'll try a USB 1.1 card and see if that helps.
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