Just a bunch of questions - about the NE64

[RChapman]

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Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2005 3:14 pm    

HI,
I'm getting ready to do some work on a NE64 based board and had some questions :

- I'm still a little confused on wether to use OpenTCP or uIP :
- In the application I will just have a webclient, which is the easiest stack to do this with? are there samples of a webclient in either.
- SSL would be really great to have, alternatively I'll have to do application level encryption, any idea if either has SSL support?

- are there samples in the gnu tools on how to use the SCI subsystem, I'm going to interface it with a 8bit controller (HCS08). Any one know of any schematics that show such an interface.

- is it possible to do a firmware upgrade to the NE64 over the ethernet connection? Are there any sample apps that show how to do this?

thanks.

Posted: Fri Nov 18, 2005 3:03 pm    

-I'm using OpenTCP in my application. It's hard to get your head round at first, as it has obviously been written by more than one person, and this makes debugging it a tiresome process. There are also a few bugs here and there, but it does work. Open TCP also contains application code written for icmp, bootp, dhcp (which is buggy), dns, tftp, udp and http server.

-uIP has a webclient application from what I have seen whereas OpenTCP has a webserver application.

-As far as SSL goes I don't have a clue about whether they support it as I do not need to use it.

- I'm using the SCI ports to carry out communication via RS232/485 and is relatively simple to set up. There are some maths involved to set up your baud rates and, just so you know, the ethernet comms requires a 25MHz Xtal to be used. I'm not to sure about interfacing to another micro but carry out a search on the freescale website in their document section.

- It is possible to carry out a firmware upgrade with the NE64 over ethernet. The upgrade will have to be done via UDP or TFTP (which is taken from UDP). You will have to send the MCU a UDP update command, which can then set up the MCU so it will be ready to accept upgrade data. You will also need a piece of code that will write the contents of a location in RAM to Flash, and it needs to run from RAM as you can't read and write Flash at the same time. An example can be found on the Freescale NE64 page application note AN2720. You may have to modify it before you use it because, from what I recall, it doesn't work properly and I know I had to play around with it to get it working properly.

Posted: Fri Nov 18, 2005 8:00 pm    

>> from what I recall, it doesn't work properly and I know I had to play >> around with it to get it working properly.

Any idea what kind of problems were there? (I won't have a board for a few weeks to start playing with so any clues would be useful) are there any examples of a working network based bootloader.

I read someplace that for a production application, one needs to buy/provision MAC addresses. Any idea whats the deal with that, where does one go to buy a block etc?

Thanks,

Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2005 10:02 am    

When trying out the flash writing application I modified the code to basically transfer a block of written flash to another empty unused block. The software files from Frescale are aranged well, with each function split up according to what they do, e.g. 'write_flash_block', 'write_flash_sector', 'erase_block' etc. So it is easy to modify them if required.
You will have to be very aware on how you set up your memory blocks, and make sure that you set up the required page in the PPAGE register before writing to the flash block, otherwise your software will just crash when it can't find the flash block.
Use the notes that come with the software files, as well as the user manual form the NE64, they will come in very handy.
I would advise you to get the board first so that you can see exactly what the code is trying to do before making adjustments. I did find that even though I was setting everything up correctly the flash writing funtion was returning ambiguous flag errors, so I modified the flag checking which solved things.

Quote:

are there any examples of a working network based bootloader

As far as I am aware Freescale do not provide any network based bootloader applications, but if I am wrong feel free to correct me on that.

Quote:

I read someplace that for a production application, one needs to buy/provision MAC addresses. Any idea whats the deal with that, where does one go to buy a block etc?

You will need to apply for a MAC address ID. These are the first three numbers of the MAC address 'XX-XX-XX' After these ID numbers you can then start at 00-00-00, 00-00-01, 00-00-02 etc. To get the MAC address ID you have to apply to the IEEE. It seems like they may be free, but check with them first, I didn't sort the MAC address allocation for my company so I'm not 100% sure. Go to standards.ieee.org/regauth/ and here you will find all the info you need. If you are not sure then email them and I'm sure they will be keen to help.