Hello,

@Eric: Thanks for your help so far. I've got the experimenter boards in my
hands now.

I did "somehow" manage to flash the blinking LED program on it and got it
to run. But I am not able to establish a clean working environment. Just a
few questions regarding that. My setup is as follows,
Ubuntu 11.10 (kernel 3.0.0-21-generic-pae)
using msp430 v4.6 stuff from (http://tinyprod.net/repos/debian/)*
*tinyOS tree is checked out from (tp-freeforall/prod - msp430-int branch)
on May 26 (37b8f01e530ee26577fdbe85f039af3059067b65)
using msp430-jtag from the python utilities (
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-msp430-tools)
*
*I updated the FET430UIF to the V3 firmware. I built the libmsp430.so from
source using the TI wiki. Using this, I was able to run the mspdebug tool
using the 'tilib' option. So I manually flashed the main.ihex file on to
the the chip and got it to run. Also, I was able to flash the chip using
the msp430-jtag file through the TinyOS toolchain. But I have several
doubts about the environment

1. The msp430-jtag is listed as a TODO in your toolchain (tp-freeforall).
Also, it is not available from the msp430-gcc installation package with the
v4.6 stuff. So I am currently using the one mentioned above from python
utilities. This "seems" to provide a similar interface as the original one
(from the mspgcc CVS). Some options have changed, which I reflected in the
makefiles. Other than that, do you know if this package is correct to use
for flashing the chip? Do you have a custom package that you use?

The bigger problem with this is that this python package provides a
duplicate of several other packages (such as msp430-gdb) which I downloaded
from the tinyprod.net site. The one provided by the python seems similar to
mspdebug, rather than gdb. So its a bit confusing.

2. Most of the posts on the net mention being able to use the 'uif' or
'uif-bsl' modes with the JTAG. However, whenever I try that I get errors in
the connection (I'll explain later why I'm trying to use it)
for uif
uif: read error: Connection timed out
fet: open failed

for uif-bsl
bsl: bootloader start returned error 128 (Unknown error)
bsl: warning: FET firmware not responding
bsl: bad ack character: 5
bsl: bad ack character: 92
bsl: sync failed

I'm guessing/rather hoping that this has something to do with the V3 not
being usable in the bsl mode. Perhaps you could shed some light on that.

3. My device (again I'm guessing because of the V3 firmware) shows up as
/dev/ttyACM0. The device ID and vendor ID I get is deviant from most of the
literature I have seen on the internet. Also, plugging in the USB doesn't
initiate the loading of the ti3410 kernel module. In fact manually loading
this module changes nothing in the system. Now I am able to run the
debugger and connect to it (its crashing for now but I got it to work
once). I don't know if its because of this different type of interface. Do
you have any comments/clarifications about this problem?
Below are the outputs of dmesg and lsusb after plugging in the board

dmesg
[34487.948166] usb 6-2: new full speed USB device number 9 using uhci_hcd
[34488.160347] cdc_acm 6-2:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It
is not a modem.
[34488.160411] cdc_acm 6-2:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device

lsusbBus 006 Device 009: ID 2047:0010 Texas Instruments
Device Descriptor:
  bLength                18
  bDescriptorType         1
  bcdUSB               2.00
  bDeviceClass            2 Communications
  bDeviceSubClass         0
  bDeviceProtocol         0
  bMaxPacketSize0         8
  idVendor           0x2047 Texas Instruments
  idProduct          0x0010
  bcdDevice            1.04
  iManufacturer           1 Texas Instruments
  iProduct                2 Texas Instruments MSP430-JTAG
  iSerial                 3 77FF598CDECE430F
  bNumConfigurations      1


I think that most of the confusions I have arise because of a lack of
understanding of the toolchain and the JTAG and BSL interfaces. Also, there
is some confusions in my mind regarding using serial debuggers. I have been
reading a lot on these topics. But this still seems fuzzy. If you have any
good recommendations of things I could look at to better understand this
process and debugging of the board, I'd appreciate it. I think for the type
of algorithms I intend to implement, it will be really helpful to be
comfortable with the overall chain, rather than using it as a simple gui
tool.

Thanks a lot for your help

Shalabh
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