Zilog Z8 Encore XP help

[Bob Parker]

Please let us know how you went. Me and two mates bought those kits
(the 8 pin ones) but we haven't had time to properly play around with
them yet. It looks like a nice micro.

Regards,
Bob

 

[Mark Harriss]

Hi People,
I recently bought a Z8 Encore XP
microcontrolled dev kit and I'm having
proglems with establishing a connection with
the board itself so I can program the Flash.

i'm using a USB smartcable/dongle to connect
to the board but I'm having trouble finding
setup documentation for jumper settings on the
development board

Can anyone give a few pointers to relevant
docs or directly help me?.

Regards
Mark H

 

[Bob Parker]

Geez, they sure don't make it easy, do they? Zilog's desperately
trying to claw back market share, and this kind of needless problem is
going to lose them lots of potential customers.
Good luck with sorting through the mess. It'll be interesting to
get your thoughts about the Encore once you can actually use the
thing.

Regards
Bob

 

[Mark Harriss]

Please let us know how you went. Me and two mates bought those kits
(the 8 pin ones) but we haven't had time to properly play around with
them yet. It looks like a nice micro.

Regards,
Bob

Will do Bob, at the moment the USB driver seems to install
properly and so does the software, there's 11 jumpers that need to
be set and the user's manual is referring to a differently numbered
set of jumpers, possibly the difference between the 28 pin kit and
the 8 pin kit. According to the readme there may be a CYGWIN/ZDSII
program conflict, a USB conflict or some kind of jumper problem.

Regards
Mark H

 

[Mark Harriss]

Ok the correct user manual is UM0187.pdf not UM0166.
With a bit of eyeballing of the schematic and the jumper
settings it all looks straightforward. The USB smartcable,
if connected as per it's labels for the bottom side of
each connector has a half twist in it which is not shown
in the kit photos of it connected up so I'll have to check
that out some more.

(Found the cable manual UM0181, which is not on the CDROM as
stated) this states the connector stripe aligns with pin 1
on the connector: IOW with a half twist.

I've tried all of the README advice but I still can't get
a connection yet, must be some software settings or
something.

Regards
Mark H

 

[[email protected]]

Zilog technical support sux.
I'm still waiting for a response from them weeks after asking my
question despite the automated email promising a response in 3-5
working days.
Use the yahoo groups to get community support is much better.
My XP kit is due to arrive next week so I can't help out till then.
Regards,
Dean.

 

[bodgy]

I bought this kit, I found on my laptop that the USB
programmer/debugger wouldn't work (although recognised) on my PCMIA 4
port USB2.0 hub.

Bung it into a normal 1.1 hub on the motherboard and it all worked.

The jumpers (on mine) were in the correct position for the led demo,
and the uP was preprogrammed with it.

What they don't say is that to use the debugger/programmer the debug
jumper must be in position.

Colin

 

[David L. Jones]

I fixed the problem!!! : I switched to Atmel instead.

Atmels certainly ain't the ducks guts either.

You can easily lock up their ISP port making the chip useless in any
serial programmer. Just what you need when you have a part soldered
onto the board - real nasty.
Their ATtiny26 device wasn't compatible with their own development
system either - needed modifications, and wasn't adequately documented.


I certainly had a very unpleasant introduction to Atmels.

Dave

 

[Mark Harriss]

Geez, they sure don't make it easy, do they? Zilog's desperately
trying to claw back market share, and this kind of needless problem is
going to lose them lots of potential customers.
Good luck with sorting through the mess. It'll be interesting to
get your thoughts about the Encore once you can actually use the
thing.

Regards
Bob

I had a response from Vinay (Bombay???) at Zilog telling me a set of
jumper settings and sequence of settings for the software which is
pretty much what I had after reading all the docs: there does seem to
be some kind of problem here: I tried a second board and smart cable
with exactly the same result: the software spots the cable ok but it
gives a comms error when I try to program it. I'll try a second computer
and see what happens.

Regards
Mark

 

[Bob Parker]

Why is it that documentation seems to be the weak point with most
brands of micros? The only doco I thought was excellent was for the
old Motorola ones.
I hope you can get the Encore working somehow. The actual device
looks really nice, from what little I've read about it.
Good luck!!

Regards,
Bob

 

[[email protected]]

Yes, we've introduced the Encore into some of our new products mainly
because we were very familiar with the Z8 otp products and it was an
easier transition from existing assembler programs. I do like being
able to directly address the complete register file on the Z8 in
assembler but this is not an issue once writing in C.
Looking back I wish we had changed to Atmel instead, it's got a lot of
community support (avrfreaks), free C compiler and wide supply voltage
range. Zilog technical support is no good and I hate trying to
interface from 3.3 volts all the time. I'm now using Atmel for my own
projects but the boss is reluctant to "introduce two technologies into
the place".
Dean

 

[Mark Harriss]

I bought this kit, I found on my laptop that the USB
programmer/debugger wouldn't work (although recognised) on my PCMIA 4
port USB2.0 hub.

Bung it into a normal 1.1 hub on the motherboard and it all worked.

The jumpers (on mine) were in the correct position for the led demo,
and the uP was preprogrammed with it.

What they don't say is that to use the debugger/programmer the debug
jumper must be in position.

Colin

Thanks Colin,
I'm checking out the Yahoo groups now and it seems
to be a very common problem: some people have been able to get it
to work by plugging in the USB cable first then the power cable.

 

[Mark Harriss]

Geez, they sure don't make it easy, do they? Zilog's desperately
trying to claw back market share, and this kind of needless problem is
going to lose them lots of potential customers.
Good luck with sorting through the mess. It'll be interesting to
get your thoughts about the Encore once you can actually use the
thing.

Regards
Bob

I fixed the problem!!! : I switched to Atmel instead.

 

[Alex Gibson]

I quite like the AVR's and Atmel 8051 chips.
The new with usb is good AT89C5131 32KB , single cycle
cheaper to get one of the futurlec.com.au boards
http://www.futurlec.com/USBDevBoard.shtml

Sounds like I was spoilt with Motorola micros: ocassionally
you might get a corrupt config register but that's easily fixed.
All you had to do was hook up power, a crystal and serial and they
were ready to program.

Pics have plenty of docs these days.
The 18f's with usb are dam handy. 18f4550

The moto / freescale 56f807 and 56fxxx dsp hybrids are pretty well docmented
just a pity that code warrior is such a p.o.s

The new Philips arm7 chips lpc2xxx are very nice
but the docs are fairly light on.

I recieved one of the nice keil mcp2130 boards
from the current circuit cellar contest for the lpc2138.
http://www.jandspromotions.com/philips2005/

http://www.semiconductors.philips.com/pip/LPC2132FBD64.html
512KB flash , 32KB ram , 60MHz , 8x 10bitADC , 6x pwm
2x usart , spi ,2x i2c, ssp

programmable via serial bootloader or jtag

http://www.semiconductors.philips.c...crocontrollers/key_solutions/32bit/index.html

setting up arm-gcc with eclipse - free ide and compiler
http://www.newmicros.com/download/appnotes/ARM/TiniARM_Dev_Eclipse.pdf

Cheapest dev board is from www.newmicros.com US$64 for lpc2132
and the olimex boards. www.sparkfun.com

Adilam is the local distributor for the lpc chips www.adilam.com.au

lpc2138 is around $13 - 15 in small quantities
lpc2106 $12 - 14 in small quantities

lpc210x chips don't have code protection

lpc chips with usb are supposedly comming Q3 2005.
Also supposed to be one with onchip ethernet as well.

Spending more and more time with fpgas and dsp chips lately.
Xilinx edk(embedded development kit)

Alex

 

[Mark Harriss]

Atmels certainly ain't the ducks guts either.

You can easily lock up their ISP port making the chip useless in any
serial programmer. Just what you need when you have a part soldered
onto the board - real nasty.
Their ATtiny26 device wasn't compatible with their own development
system either - needed modifications, and wasn't adequately documented.


I certainly had a very unpleasant introduction to Atmels.

Dave

Sounds like I was spoilt with Motorola micros: ocassionally
you might get a corrupt config register but that's easily fixed.
All you had to do was hook up power, a crystal and serial and they
were ready to program.

 

[Bob Parker]

G'day Mark,
That's not so great. One of my mates who also bought one of the
Zilog XP boards said he thought the USB cable was up to the 2.0
standard. Looks like he's in for a bit of a surprise.
I might see if I can get mine doing something this long weekend,
even if it's only the sample LED flashing code.

Regards
Bob

 

[Mark Harriss]

Why is it that documentation seems to be the weak point with most
brands of micros? The only doco I thought was excellent was for the
old Motorola ones.
I hope you can get the Encore working somehow. The actual device
looks really nice, from what little I've read about it.
Good luck!!

Regards,
Bob

Hi Bob: I got it working eventually: trouble is it's not working on
my computer. It will work on a USB 1.1 computer but not a modern USB
2.0 computer- it's as simple as that, the driver or the smartcable
has an incompatibilty with the latest USB standard.

Regards
Mark Harriss

 

[Bob Parker]

Hi again,
I finally got around to installing the package on my XP machine. I
plugged the USB adaptor into what I'm pretty sure is a USB 2.0 socket,
installed the driver and it all worked OK.
I changed the jumper settings to set up the "User" mode had a bit
of a play with the ZDS, and managed to unintentionally overwrite the
demo program in the micro with an example one which just blinks one
LED, so it appears to all be working.
I think I now have a rather steep learning curve to get used to the
extra instructions and things on the chip. It's a bit hard to know
what to do with an 8 pin micro....
I hope you can find out why your USB cables don't want to talk to
your PCs. Once the ZDS is running, it all seems to work pretty well.
Good luck.

Regards,
Bob

 

[Mark Harriss]

G'day Mark,
That's not so great. One of my mates who also bought one of the
Zilog XP boards said he thought the USB cable was up to the 2.0
standard. Looks like he's in for a bit of a surprise.
I might see if I can get mine doing something this long weekend,
even if it's only the sample LED flashing code.

Regards
Bob

Sanjay and Vinay of Zilog technical support tell me it's USB 2
compatible but according to Yahoo groups other people have had the same
problem. I did a clean re-install on the uSB 2 machine but that did do
it either. I'll try a USB 1.1 card and see if that helps.

Regards
Mark Harriss

 

[Bob Parker]

Hi Mark,
My friend who also got one of the Encore XP 8-pin kits had all the
same problems with the USB cable as you. I'm not 100% sure of what he
did to correct it, but he also wasted a lot of time.
So far it looks like I'm the only person who hasn't had major
problems making it work.
I've been reading through the documentation of the Encore XP series
and it looks like a micro worth persevering with... even if it runs on
3.3V. I suppose the good thing is that it could be powered by a pair
of torch cells.

Regards,
Bob