Comments on: Atmel Xplain Xmega board Gotchas

By: frank

frank — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 13:35:04 +0000

Good to know – thanks for the updates.

By: hyper

hyper — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 01:16:54 +0000

One more update…
I just got a rev. 7 XPLAIN board and the schematic shows R100 which is a 100K pullup on the reset line (aka. PDI CLK). I haven’t even fired it up yet, but I’m guess that the ‘Board Doesn’t Restart Properly’ problem has been fixed.

By: Bill Somerville

Bill Somerville — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 19:42:45 +0000

Just kicking the tyres here on an Xplain board and found your blog while looking for info on peoples experiences with the DAC.

My Xplain came with the BOOTRST fuse un-programmed on the AT90USB1287 board controller MCU – this has to be programmed before the supplied FLIP compatible boot loader will work. Bit of a dumb setup by the manufacturer unless they had some reason for crippling the board. You need to jumper the TDI pin to ground on the board controller JTAG header to enable the FLIP bootloader as well.

I used a JTAGICEMkII to fix mine, not sure how users without a JTAG programmer are supposed to sort it – but given that you need one to program the XMEGA I guess most will have one.

As for the USB CDC app, I found it works OK. I also loaded the flash drive emulation app (MSC) to the board controller using FLIP and that works just fine too.

Bill

By: Kenneth Scharf

Kenneth Scharf — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:07:19 +0000

Actually the avrispMKII DOES support the 10 pin cable without an adapter. Atmel just didn’t supply the cable. Get or make up a short cable with a 10 pin connector on each end. Snap open the avrisp (you have to insert a screwdriver into the plastic clamps holding the case together while prying it open with another screwdriver. It looks hard to do, but it opens easily. You’ll see that the PC board has BOTH connectors on it. In the event that they have depopulated the 10 pin connector from the board you’ll have to solder one to the provided pads, however the units I’ve opened up had both connectors installed.

By: Dean Camera

Dean Camera — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:18:37 +0000

And another update – I’ve just finished a first revision of an XPLAIN programmer firmware for the onboard AT90USB1287, also located in the LUFA SVN as well as this AVRFreaks thread: http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=87393. When loaded, it will cause the XPLAIN board to enumerate as an Atmel AVRISP-MKII which (with the latest AVRStudio release) can PDI program the onboard XMEGA.

- Dean

By: ArnodB

ArnodB — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:02:04 +0000

> In theory you can reprogram the 1287 via the USB port, using Atmel’s “FLIP” utility
> (available on their website). For me, that didn’t work either, and I really tried hard. No FLIP for me!

Old Rev 1 Xplains didn’t have the necessary bootloader in the 1287. Rev 2 and later ones have it, but the procedure described in AVR1907 to enter the bootloader is incomplete. I have summarized my experience in http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&p=645225 I use Ubuntu, but checked that the pushbuttons I added works with FLIP under Windows, too.

By: frank

frank — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:03:49 +0000

That is indeed a good note – thanks! I have updated the post.

By: Dean Camera

Dean Camera — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:24:05 +0000

Hi Frank,

Just a minor correction to your excellent post. My LUFA project does indeed contain a USBtoSerial demo which converts between a USB port and a physical serial port, however I’ve been told this won’t work on the XPLAIN board as the XMEGA->AT90USB link is via a software and not hardware UART. That said, as of this morning, there is a new “XMEGABridge” project in the LUFA SVN which should implement the required software USART bridge to restore that functionality to the XPLAIN boards.

Cheers!
- Dean