SparkFun Forums

[Cannibal]

please don't misinterprete and manipulate my post - read what I wrote:
"I'm pretty much confident that our OKI board is the best value for the money you can get on the market"

the code on our web is provided "as is" to easy our customers

Sorry, at times I've found it difficult to follow your meaning... see above.

I wrote OKI board, if you say this is wrong let me know which else OKI chip based board offer more value for less money please?

My understanding of ARM cpus is that the ARM architecture is maintained by a 3rd party (british?) company, and that manufacturers such as Oki, Phillips, Analog Devices, etc only add a subset of peripherals (all the ADu devices come with fast ADC's for example).

So does my reccomendation of the GBA constitue an Oki product? You're right, it does not.

Does the GBA DS alternative contain an ARM9, and an ARM7, and Colour LCD(s), and a plethora of examples and support for less money? Why yes it does

If we're going to be so needlessly brand concious why don't we just say 'the Olimex oki board represents the best Olimex oki board on the market.'

Someone tomorrow will reqest code which works on Keil or Realview.

Those aren't your reccomended development tools, I'd completely understand if you didn't want to associate with them given your support of IAR. But in light of your reccomendation, and being a distributor of IAR in the country of Bulgaria, I think it's reasonable to assume that you are experts on the software you reccomend.

Not big deal really when you work in C but from your posts it seems like you are looking more for someone to do your homework, instead to try to solve this simple challenge yourself?

Are you aware that the flash code example that is on your site, is an assembly example, written by a Japanese fellow named 'freewing' (who did a great job by the way) that Olimex simply links to.... in effect letting him do the that part of the homework for your *Company* that makes money on these things, as well as using his bandwidth to do it? LOL

Bluster, backed by hypocrisy.

To answer your question about solving this simple challenge myself, I am currently working on it, but if Olimex has already solved this problem (as you seem to be insinuating), why are you not sharing with your customers? I agree that exploration is important, but there's a fine line between 'challenge' and 'baffling ordeal', with this product and development tool squarely placed in the 'ordeal' category

this may change soon when we are ready with WinARM/OpenOCD install package, probably we'll make all our future board examples on GCC + Eclipse/OpenOCD

If you're telling me that all I need to do is have patience, and you'll show us how to use the flash on your products, I will firstly have patience, and second, I will apologize for not having faith in your company.

Please let me know Tsvetan, perhaps I have been too hard on Olimex.

[sparky]

Hey Cannibal,

Walk your line carefully. The minute you start picking on people for their creative use of the english language or their politics (which you seem to have intuited all on your own), be prepared for little or no help.

Plainly, Tsvetan has been as kind and as helpful as time has permitted. Please do not use any more of it. We openly and gladly admit we are a brown-box company (well, SFE and Olimex are separate companies but run things similarly). At SFE, we just can't keep up with the documentation for all our products. We really wish we could! But it's a trade off - you get what you pay for.

If you really can't figure out the OKI system, feel free to return it for a full refund. Tsvetan is completely correct - you will NOT find a cheaper development platform. What you will find are more expensive eval kits ($5k is not uncommon, some low end kits can be found for ~$1k). These will have books of documentation and phone numbers to call so that you can get help when you need it. But at this time, more example code and assistance must be on your own. I encourage you to use the forum as much as possible so that other users can learn as well.

Best of luck with your learning curve - it's painful but I'm sure you'll weather it.

-Nathan

[Cannibal]

Sparky, please check your inbox 8)

Approximately 4.5 hours ago I submitted a guide to sparkfun that details how to fix the olimex projects, that can show your users how to program the flash on the oki chip, using the IAR tools reccomended by Olimex.

I just want you guys to test it to make sure you can duplicate my results.

Tsvetan is completely correct - you will NOT find a cheaper development platform

Please read back over several of my posts, I link to:
GBA hardware, GBA development tools (flash unit and cabling), and GBA software, for substantially less than the solution under discussion.

If you really can't figure out the OKI system, feel free to return it for a full refund.

That's a very kind offer, and shows true reliability on the part of sparkfun, but i think we should both be able to rely on support from further up the chain. Especially from those who describe their products as the best value on the market

Plainly, Tsvetan has been as kind and as helpful as time has permitted.

Oh dear... please do read the previous posts, Tsvetan has done nothing but pass the buck from one 3rd party to another (first it was to IAR).

The only people who have helped actively me through this have been an Oki engineer. It would seem that they sell one chip and they're willing to help, regardless of who made money selling the board to you

Notwithstanding your offer of a return, but that is a very recent development.

Walk your line carefully. The minute you start picking on people for their creative use of the english language or their politics (which you seem to have intuited all on your own), be prepared for little or no help.

You are correct, i will try to be more understanding, and will edit my post.

[sn00p]

Please read back over several of my posts, I link to:
GBA hardware, GBA development tools (flash unit and cabling), and GBA software, for substantially less than the solution under discussion.

You seem to be under the impression that the GBA is a development platform, it isn't, it's a consumer product. Can you easily attach your own peripherals to it, does it have a prototyping area, is it using the processor that you are going to use in your prototype?

I know the answer to at least 2 of those questions and they're no, which definately means it's not a development board, it's a toy.

If I came into work and said "ok, we need to get a ARM based prototype up and running" and followed that up by saying "Lets use a GBA!", I'd get laughed at, ridiculed, told off and would never live it down, why? It's not a development board - it's not letting me test the capabilities of the processor I intend to use.

For example, the philips LPC & SAM7 are both ARM processors, but that's where the similarities end - I wouldn't use a LPC part for a prototype if my target processor is a SAM7.

We develop in 'C', so the instruction set is largely irrelevent to me - my code could be targetting a C51, PIC, AVR, X86 - it's the peripheral access which is the key, not the instruction set.

[fordp]

I think my boss would be shocked if I suggested instead of usings an LPC2103 which costs about $2.50 dollars we buy GBA's and dismantle them to get the ASIC chip out to use on our products

[fordp]

I forgot to say that the FTDI based debugger + PSU and serial port sounds brilliant.

I will order at least one when it comes out.

When Dominic add's ARM926 suport I will order 5 !

[OLIMEX]

Dominic don't have AT91SAM9261 board to test OpenOCD with ARM926 but we at Olimex started the design of board with it so in few months there will be support for this (well at least hardware I can commit to

[MechEE]

Will the ARM-USB-OCD be available through SparkFun or Olimex directly before the July 24th vacation deadline? Thanks!

[MechEE]

I noticed that the ARM-USB-OCD is up with pictures on the Olimex web page, and it looks great! I can definitely see it becoming the standard in ARM debugging hardware. Nice work!

[gogon]

Does Olimex USB JTAG can use with OCDemon Flash memory Programmer 2.5.6?

Thanks

Regards

[englere]

>Does Olimex USB JTAG can use with OCDemon Flash memory Programmer 2.5.6?

I don't think so, but OpenOCD should work with it nicely.

Eric