Silabs F330 Toolstick - recent success?

Has anyone had any success with a recent production "toolstick" programmer for the SiLabs 8051 derivatives, specifically the 'F330 model?

Picked one up for a project and am finding that the silabs windows application crashes on startup, while the open source linux driver (ec2drv) fails with USB read timeout errors.

Not to mention the PCB stock was a mess of fiberglass splinters where it had been sheared - so bad in fact that the first thing I did was mix up some 5 minute epoxy and paint it on the raw edge.

Will have to try the windows software on another machine, but this is disappointing - cheap development tools for tiny processors are great; but only if they work. Anyone had any luck recently?

Reply to
cs_posting
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well the F330 target board has the V-scoring cut a little bit too little maybe so the edge is a bit raw, but is it that bad?

SiLabs IDE has NOT CRASHED a single time, on this win Vista notebook.

So i wonder really how come you have so much trouble. I am writing 3rd article about SiLabs MCUs at the moment and well having trouble too, but they are related to my own target boards

it seems the SCL pin in SMBus hardware mode does disable the port pullup? i happily did not include SCL external pullup as it usually is not required.

but seems SiLabs requires SCL pullup to be present if SMBUS is used

Antti

Reply to
Antti

Would be a good idea anyway, because usually pullups are very high, e.g. for the C8051F320 if weak pullup is enabled, the datasheet says that there is a current of max. 50 uA, if you connect the pin to 0 V. But less than 1 mA is not a good idea for a SMBUS or I2C bus pullup.

This might be an advantage for SPI for low power systems, because with SPI you need to charge the parasitic capacitance, only. No need to short the pullup, which is even necessary for SCL, if you support clock stretching.

--
Frank Buss, fb@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
Reply to
Frank Buss

Me too. With a closed source application like this, it's pretty much impossible to tell.

I've been all the way through the source of the linux driver and know exactly where it is failing, but have no way of knowing if it's reasonable for it to be expecting a response over the usb or not...

Reply to
cs_posting

really strange, silabs debug adapter is HID device so it uses no drivers so it should work well (no special driver needed)

do you have the problem with the toolstick only or also with the debug adapter?

i have worked with toolstick-BA, toolstick-EK and the debug adapter and i have NEVER see silabs ide to crash

it may occasionally loose communication during debug cycle but thats all, it doesnt crash, it doesnt self terminate, just works

Antti

Reply to
Antti

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tems.de

well, if i only have 1 i2c device that does NOT do clock stretching then adding SCL pullup is extra PITA, if space is contraint. I hoped to get away without it.

but, my major problem seems to something else, the same i2c device is mounted on different platform (DS) with full SPI pins connected

when reading the device registers over SPI after powerup it shows i2c interface disable bit SET

the silabs PCB has only i2c pins connected, so it is not possible to access the device at all :(

Antti

Reply to
Antti

What was actually crashing during startup was the toolstick terminal program. Turns out I had not downloaded the IDE proper. The IDE works, but the terminal still crashes. IDE wanted to upgrade the firmware when first run. Unfortunately that didn't fix the linux driver timeout issue.

Turns out I was wrong about the closed source comment - the source for the toolstick terminal program actually is included, so someday maybe I'll figure out how to make it work.

Reply to
cs_posting

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