Tag: stc

stcdude 0.1-rc1 is here.

Well, that was fun, and I can now finally show off with the first release of the stcdude.
stcdude is an opensource ISP programmer for the STC microcontrollers designed to run under linux from commandline. A long awaited sane replacement for the retarted STC ISP Tool written in VB6.
Finally you can get on with the development using the tools you like: sdcc and make.

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Some fun calculus

Fun with STC goes on. This time it came down to a nice&shiny maths task. So. The Host computer determines the frequency the MCU is running at using 8 16-bit numbers transmitted in the infopacket. These are the raw timer values of 8 samples, that measure some part of a timing diagram. What part of 2 bytes being transmitted ( {0x7f, 0x7f} ) is measured – we do not yet know. From these we have to determine the MCU frequency. Fun calculus under teh break.

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Say hello to stcdude.

Okay, it’s been a while, since I made any (real) progress on the issue, but now, well, there’s at least something to show.
I happened to be an idiot and spent a few days trying to crack a CRC-16 with a non-standard polynome, and didn’t see that it was a plain sum of the payload bytes. Afterwards, stuff was quite trivial and the protocol – simple as hell. Right now I wrote some quick and dirty parsers in bash and lua to get me the mcudb out of KEIL CDB file processed with ‘strings’. Right now it’s just a plain lua table dump, that can be updated with info extracted from a keil cdb file or by hand. Kind of slow, but for this purpose I think it’s ok for now.
Anyway, my ‘proof-of-concept’ code already does the basic things like getting and partially decoding the info packet: 

[necromant@lamia stcdude]$ ./stcdude -d ./mcudb/stc12x.lua -p /dev/ttyUSB1 -i
STC ISP Tool. (c) Necromant 2012
Using mcudb file: ./mcudb/stc12x.lua
Loading mcudb ./init.lua
Done with result 0
Loading mcudb ./mcudb/stc12x.lua
Done with result 0
Using /dev/ttyUSB1 @ 19200
fd is 3
Waiting for an infopacket from MCU...
 --- 8< ---
Part name:       STC12C5A32S2
Magic bytes:     D170
IRAM size:       256 (0x100) bytes
XRAM size:       1024 (0x400) bytes
IROM size:       32768 (0x8000) bytes
Tested ops: FixMe: implement reading of tested ops
Description:
        8051-based microcontroller with 1T(1-clock) High-Speed Core,
        Dual DPTR, 36-44 I/O Lines, 2 Timers/Counters, 2 PCA Timers,
        Alternative build-in oscillator,
        Independent Baud Rate Generator, Programmable Clock-Out,
        32K bytes flash ROM, 1280 bytes data RAM,
        On-chip EEPROM, 2 UARTs, WDT, ISP/IAP, A/D, CCP/PWMm
--- 8< ---

Further stuff is still work-in-progress, diggings showed up, that there might be at least 3 different variations of the ISP protocol, so we're far from full-blown support. But since most things stay the same, after the initial skeleton is ready, adding support for further variations should be straightforward.
For those who want to try out this stuff, grab your copy at my github.

STC 8051: Some research notes

I picked up a bunch of those uCs + a dev board quite some time ago. I even did some initial digging, but due to the lack of free time postponed any work on them. These uCs may not seem that tasty as stm32, but are still quite powerful and dirt cheap. (If you want to flood the market with something).


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