Development platform for Bay Trail-T

[BBerg7]

Hi,

I'm wondering if there are any Bay Trail-T platform out there suitable for firmware development? With suitable I mean a socket for flash and anything that can show life early in the POST process.

First of all, it must have a power on LED showing BSP CPU life. Second it needs to have some way to communicate with the outside world that are available early. That can be a debug interface like XDP, a legacy serial port, a port 0x80 display, a GPIO controlled LED or even a buzzer connected to the speaker signal. Anything you can use to show that the firmware is running.

Moving code for lighting a LED or beeping in a speaker is tedious, but it works. Port 0x80 is good, serial port is even better and XDP is the best of all.

I will appreciate any tip on platforms. Surprisingly, the board or product vendors know very little about these things. I'm sure that early in the development cycle they had some prototype with the required connections.

Best regards,

B-O

[idata]

Hello B-O,

Welcome back to the Intel® Embedded Community.

I'm working on getting an answer to your question. Have a great day and we'll be talking with you soon!

Regards,

Leon

[BBerg7]

Thanks!

B-O

[idata]

Hello B-O,

Here's some information I found.

Bay Trail – T Platform Bay Lake Reference Validation Platform

Document Number: 515291

Regards,

Leon

[Natalie_Z_Intel]

Hi, B-O. Document 515291 is not loaded on the EDC. We'll try to get that going for you. We will let you know when it is added to the EDC library. LynnZ.

[BBerg7]

Thanks!

B-O

[BBerg7]

Thanks! I will look into it when it's available. I ordered a Zoran Zbox PI320. According to photos it least have a socket for the SPI flash. I hope it still have when I disassemble it! I have ordered motherboards before as they had a socket on the photos, but when they arrived they have a soldered chip.

Intel should make development boards with port 0x80, XDP, UART, SPI flash socket or header. That would be great. A cheap probe for DXP would not hurt either. In the past we could use Mcgraigor probe, but that probe is not available for Bay Trail architecture.

Guess I will have to continue dreaming. Ha ha. Anyway, I must say that Intel x86 is truly amazing, beyond dreams. I think most people are not aware of how powerful and genius the latest X86 architectures are. We are feeding it with massive bloatware and it's still performs very good. Thank you Intel for your X86 magic!!!!

[Natalie_Z_Intel]

Hello! Document 515291 is now searchable on the EDC. Just go to http://edc.intel.com/ http://edc.intel.com and type '515291' in the search box. Hope this helps! LynnZ.

[BBerg7]

Thank you Lynn!

I have checked iit. Unfortunately it will not help me as it's not the target Bay Trail series I'm looking for.

Best regards,

B-O

[Adolfo_S_Intel]

Hello B-O

You might want to check also the Sharks Cove development board: http://www.sharkscove.org/ SharksCove.org | Tablet Development Board

This is a joint effort between Microsoft* and Intel* . It uses an Intel ® ATOM™ Processor Z3735G , 2M Cache, 4 Core, 1.33GHz up to 1.88GHz

This board has a Port80/81 LED display, SPI debug interface,a micro USB for UART debugging, and an XDP 60-pin connector.

It is used to test Windows and Android operating systems.

Best Regards,

Adolfo

[SZann]

Unfortunately (as can be seen from this http://i.imgur.com/tHBCmyR.jpg http://i.imgur.com/tHBCmyR.jpg image) SharksCove boards that anyone can buy from Mouser do no have the blue xdp connector soldered.

[Adolfo_S_Intel]

Hello Samuele

You are right, I checked the block diagram and saw the XDP port, but it seems that the XDP port has not been implemented on the current FAB.

Thanks for the clarification.

Regards,

Adolfo

[BBerg7]

I'm ordering the board and for me it's a good help with our without the XDP port. Having an XDP port, you also need a expensive probe and software to use it. I have built in debug support in BIOS I can use with a serial port that is usually enough for serious debugging. For quick debugging I use port 0x80 or UART message logging.

But full XDP would be very useful for debugging SMM code and early POST. I will let you know if my board has XDP or not.

Best regards,

B-O

[BBerg7]

Thank you Adolfo!

This is exactly what I'm looking for. It's available for order from Mouser now. I got my PI320 device today and will get a shot tomorrow. However, I think the platform you mentioned would be perfect for me, so I will order one for my lab.

Best regards,

B-O

[Gabriel_T_Intel]

Hello Berth,

Thanks for your update. We are glad that this will help.

Regards,

Gabriel Thomas.

[BBerg7]

Thank you all for your great help!