PIC firmware for the Numato Mimas v2

Overview

This replaces the factory firmware and addresses two main limitations:

• The FPGA UART now runs at 115200 baud.
• The board shows up as two USB serial ports, one for the SPI Flash programmer, one for the FPGA UART. This avoids the need to use the mode switch on the board.

Building instructions:

There's a prebuilt .hex file in the prebuilt directory.

Otherwise, get the necessary software:

• PIC development tools
  • MPLAB.X
  • XC8 compiler for MPLAB.X (e.g. linux version)
  • 60-day PRO demo
  • XC8 legacy PIC18F perhipheral library (e.g. linux version)
• mphidflash

Open the project in MPLAB.X, select Run>Build.

Flashing

Connect a jumper to the FWUP header (just above the left-most seven-segment). Power up the board and it should show up as a HID device (the Microchip HID bootloader).

$ lsusb
...
Bus 001 Device 052: ID 04d8:003c Microchip Technology, Inc.
...

Verify mphidflash can find the device:

$ ./mphidflash-1.6-linux-64
USB HID device found: 12288 bytes free
Device family: PIC18

Use mphidflash to flash the new code:

$ ./mphidflash-1.6-linux-64 -w prebuilt/numato-mimasv2-pic-firmware.production.hex

Remove the jumper and power-cycle the board.

TODO

• Make SPI flash programming faster. xmodem?
• Make the FPGA UART speed detect automatically from the host.