AVR Xplain (xmega eval board), Dragon, and OSX

Year on from my last post. If I don't have nothing worthwhile to say, I don't say anything at all ;->

Or, I've been working on various things, but had nothing to report that would be of use to anyone.

I've been interested for a while in making an xmega based arduino. Double the speed, 12 bit adc's and even dacs. Plus a ton more stuff I can't even start to think about. And cheaper than the equivalent megas. What's not to like.

So, I order an AVR XPlain, a $20 dev board for the xmega128a1 and an AVR Dragon to program it with. BTW Arrow was the only distributor I found selling the xplain at the suggested price. Everyone else seems to want to charge more.

Major joy when it arrives. Major downer when nothing seems to recognize each other.

Using AVR Dragon and Xplain under OSX

The rest of this note describes what you need to do to program an AVR Xplain using an AVR Dragon under OSX.

Unfortunately, I didn't write down the exact error message texts, nor take screen shots as I hit problems along the way ... But it doesn't matter. I was able to get it to work, and will describe
what I needed to do, and what software components you need.

Upgrade the Dragon's firmware

First, you should upgrade the firmware on the Dragon. I'm not sure if this is an optional step, but I strongly recommend you do it. If you are running under OSX, this can be a problem as it requires running avrstudio, which runs on Windows. So you'll either need a Windows box, to dual boot, or a copy of VMware, Parallels, or VirtualBox. While VMWare and Parallels cost some real money, VirtualBox is free. I have VMware, so I downloaded avrstudio, asked it to upgrade, and at about 6 seconds in the progress bar stalled, and 13 seconds in the upgrade failed, complaining that it failed when preparing to write. If you have VMware: go to the VM's USB setting's panel, and uncheck "Automatically connect usb devices". Once that is unchecked, the firmware upgrade worked fine.

Install avrdude 5.8

At first I downloaded AvrCrossPack, formerly AvrMacPack, in order to get access to the whole suite of avr tools. Unfortunately, AvrCrossPack 20090415 includes avrdude 5.6. Which if you try to use with the Dragon and the xmega fails. Badly. I believe it said that the xmega's signature bytes were 000000 not matching the xmega's expected signature bytes. So I tried using -F. No joy, another cryptic, even more cryptic error. After a long hunt, I discovered that 5.6 either has a bug, or for some other reason doesn't support this combination. Fortunately, MacPorts includes avrdude 5.8. Downloaded it, and all works great.

Save the existing flash and fuses

Save the existing flash and fuses so you can restore them later if you screw up. Here's the command line I used:

/opt/local/bin/avrdude -c dragon_jtag -P usb -p x128a1 -U flash:r:xplain.flash:i -U fuse1:r:xplain.fuse1:i -U fuse2:r:xplain.fuse2:i -U fuse3:r:xplain.fuse3:i -U fuse4:r:xplain.fuse4:i -U fuse5:r:xplain.fuse5:i -U lock:r:xplain.lock:i

After upgrading the Dragon and getting the right rev of avrdude, this worked fantastic!

Play!

After all that, now it's time to play with this beast. First up, write an arduino compatible bootloader, probably starting with Arduino's existing STK500 based bootloader.