Hi all,

I've just got an AT91SAM7S256-EK development board and I'm trying to write a little stand-alone Win32 console app that programs our code in. I'm using it in USB-serial mode (as opposed to direct serial DBGU mode), and it all comes up nicely with the Atmel-provided .INF file---when I plug in the USB port the dev board comes up as COM8.

I'm just using a terminal program we wrote here, and I can get the bootloader version with the "V#" command, and it says "v1.4 Nov 10 2004 14:49:33". All the read/write byte/halfword/word commands work, but I'm stuck with the send/receive file thing, because it doesn't seem to do Xmodem.

I stick my terminal program into hex mode to see the output properly, but when I try to do a receive file, say "R200000,123#" it just immediately spits out "0D 0A <bytes you asked for> 3E", where 3E is the '>' prompt character.

So I've got a couple of questions:

* Why doesn't it start to use Xmodem, as per Atmel documentation?

* I'm using revision C of the AT91SAM7S256 part (58818C). I know SAM-BA is supposed to work even with revision B, but maybe it doesn't do Xmodem with rev C?

* Does it depend on the SAM-BA version as given by the "V#" command? Mine says "v1.4 Nov 10 2004". That seems like a long time ago now ...

Any info or pointers would be much appreciated.

Thanks heaps,
Ben.

Okay, I've figured it out. The on-chip SAM-BA boot loader uses Xmodem in serial (COM) mode, but it sends raw data bytes in USB mode.

Anyone know why this is? It seems kinda un-orthogonal, but maybe there's a good reason for it. For me it means my PC-end programmer will have to handle both types ... though probably we'll end up using just USB mode (simpler anyway).

Maybe this behaviour is documented somewhere, but I can't seem to find it.

This appears to be a very old thread.. but here I am in 2011, with an AT91SAM7X512, and I am seeing the same type of behaviour over USB to my target. I was hoping to use TeraTermPro to receive XMODEM to read out flash/SRAM of my target. But it appears SAM-BA just immediately spits out raw binary rather than doing XMODEM.

So what's the scoop here? Is there official documentation on how the 'R' and 'S' commands really work over USB-serial?

Any info would be appreciated (I'm an AT91 newbie), thanks in advance.
-Russ