[Tinyos-help] [Tinyos-devel] How to design a hardware platform

[Aurelien Francillon]

Le Tuesday 01 July 2008 08:13:21 dum dummy, vous avez écrit :
> Hi,
>
> I have a basic question; not sure it belongs to which list, if it belongs
> here at all. But I think some of you can give me some pointers.
>
> How do I go about designing a hardware platform that would run software?

well I really can't explain you how to design a platform from scratch, my 
first guess would be to look how the similar ones are working in deep 
details ... and read the datasheets ...

> Now what? How does the 
> "cold-start" work? How do I configure the system (both my board and the PC)
> so that I can download codes? There must be some software running on the
> board that would download the code via a USB/serial cable. How is *that*
> code first downloaded (kind of a chichen-and-egg problem :) )? Do the
> processors "come" with such a code? 

JTAG is one of the more widespread way to program "cold" hardware, most of the 
existing cpu/microcontrollers have one. 
Other than that (disclaimer not all info here has been checked) some hardware 
can come with it's own protocol/bus in hardware i.e.  :
- AVR parallel/serial/spi programming ( see the section called "memory 
programming" p288 of Atmega128 datasheet)

or present as software in some dedicated place such as  :
- bsl in the msp430 (telosb) 
- sam bootloader in some arm7 CPU by Atmel 


> Next, how is the 802.11g chip "recognized"?

well the simplest is to design the software according to the platform 
otherwise if you have no idea run linux, but then you are completely out of 
topic from this list ...

Aurélien