New more compact design of ARM-USB-OCD-H(L) is released with USB-C connector

ARM-USB-OCD-H is very popular OpenOCD debugger supported by almost all IDEs and platforms. It’s in the Application notes of Intel and ARM processor vendors.

The ARM-USB-OCD-H initial design was made many years ago and some parts are obsolete like the USB-B to USB-A cable, big plastic shell from centronic 36/36 connectors etc.

As the centronic plastic became unavailable this year we decided that it’s good time to re-design ARM-USB-OCD-H completely.

Smaller and more compact plastic box is used. The USB connector now is USB-C, so popular USB phone cables can be used.

Our recommendation is customer to move to ARM-USB-OCD-HL it’s completely same as ARM-USB-OCD-H but supports targets with voltage levels from 0.65-5.5V

The popular Olimex ARM OpenOCD JTAG programmer debugger ARM-USB-OCD-H gets better, now has a modification which works with targets from 0.65 up to 5.5V

ARM-USB-OCD-H is a low-cost ARM OpenOCD debugger. It supports targets from 1.65V up to 5.0V. Many SOC manufacturers like Intel, Intel/Movidius, nVidia and others use it in their development work. Intel quotes ARM-USB-OCD-H and ARM-JTAG-20-10 in their appnote “Source Level Debug using OpenOCD/GDB/Eclipse on Intel® Quark™ SoC X1000”.

A few month ago we got an interesting question. A new SOC manufacturer was trying to debug their SOC with ARM-USB-OCD-H, but the problem was that their target was working on 1.2V. They asked us if we could modify our JTAG to be able to work at lower than 1.65V targets.

Our engineers identified a couple of components which we could upgrade to support lower voltages. The final result was that the ARM-USB-OCD-HL new modification of the JTAG can now work with targets from 0.65V up to 5.5V.

This pretty much covers all existing SOCs on the market.

Nice tutorial for writing and debugging plain C on ARM Cortex-M3 STM32F103

Jacob Mossberg wrote nice tutorial how to program in C ARM Cortex-M3 with GCC and how to debug it with GDB and OpenOCD.

We like very much the hardware he is using 🙂 STM32-H103 and ARM-USB-OCD-H.

 

Appnotes and Tutorials about Debugging UEFI and Linux Kernel on Intel SoCs with OpenOCD and ARM-USB-OCD-H or ARM-USB-TINY-H

Intel made nice video tutorial how to use OpenOCD and our JTAGs with their SoCs! This explains the frequent purchases they do from many Intel locations all around the world of ARM-USB-TINY-H , ARM-USB-OCD-H and ARM-JTAG-20-10.

Searching bit more there is application note How to setup ARM-USB-OCD-H with Intel Quark SoC X1000 and tutorials about Low-cost UEFI debugging options for Intel and How to debug Linux Kernel on Intel Quark

Developing on STM32-H152 with ChibiOS/RT

We found interesting blog post about how to setup STM32-H152 to work with ChibiOS using OpenOCD debugger.

 

Building an ARMGCC, Eclipse, OpenOCD toolchain for Windows tutorials

Michael Moore sent us set of tutorials how to build ARMGCC, Eclipse, OpenOCD toolchain for Windows and how to debug STM32-E407 with ARM-JTAG-TINY-H.

Part1 – Introduction

Part2 – Setup ARMGCC

Part3 – Setup Eclipse

Part4 – Setup GDB / OpenOCD

Debugging iMX233-OLinuXino with OpenOCD and SJTAG Tutorial

Christian Jann posted wonderful tutorial how to setup OpenOCD and SJTAG to debug iMX233-OLinuXino.

Reading the post I see Christian had no SJTAG and borrowed one from a company, we are going definitely fix this and next week will send him one of our iMX233-OLinuXino-NANO which now is assembling and iMX233-SJTAG so he could continue with his interesting tutorials 🙂

iMX233-SJTAG adapter design complete

OpenOCD supports iMX233 JTAG debugging, the scripting support is available from the Lyre project.

Using parallel JTAG though is tricky as the parallel JTAG signals are shared with SD-CARD SPI signals and if you use parallel JTAG signals you lose the SD-CARD. Without SD-CARD you can’t boot the linux image, then what we do?

iMX233 have nice serial JTAG lines which use just two signals to do JTAG debugging without messing with the other ports, but for this purpose you need to buy the expensive USD 300 SJTAG adapter from Freescale.

As iMX233-OLinuXino number of developers increase with every day we decided that we should release low cost alternative to Freescale SJTAG. We can’t release this design as open source as we received private programming logic from Freescale under NDA, so the best we can do is just to produce this adapter at low cost and make it affordable for all OLinuXino developers.

The design is complete and we run few prototypes to validate the design, if everything works well, these will be available for sale in July.