Trip-T Front End Board Documentation Home
Bootloader Introduction
The Bootloader Firmware is the firmware guaranteed to be loader on power up. Its job is to provide two functions:
- Permit the TFB to be rebooted into the User Firmware
- Allow the User Firmware to be updated in a risk free manner
Additionally, functionality accessed through the monitoring and slow
control interfaces was included. This permits inspection of the TFB
environment in the case where the user firmware isn't available.
In terms of the external interface to the RMM, the Bootloader looks
identical to the User Firmware. It has a smaller register address map, but
where common functionality exists, the mappings have been retained to
reduce the load on the interface software.
Determining which firmware is loaded is simply a case of issuing a
read command to register number 0x0. If the LSB is set, then the
bootloader is loaded, if not, then the User firmware is loaded.
The majority of the time (I expect), the only functionality accessed
will be to reload the firmware into revision 1 for in-spill
operation. This is done simply by writing a 1 into the reboot register
(address 0x1). The system self-triggers a reload of the firmware. In
total, this will take approximately 1.5 seconds to complete during
which time the TFB will be unresponsive.
Reloading the firmware stored in revision 1 of the PROM is described
on a separate page found here.