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Hardware, Raspberry, Tools

Flashing NextThing C.H.I.P. with a Raspberry Pi

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Today I somehow bricked my CHIP (I think it wasn’t the wised idea to set the system-target to network_online) as I didn’t get access via serial connection or ssh.
It wasn’t that much of a problem as I wanted to set up the CHIP as a headless system.
So the journey begins (http://docs.getchip.com/chip.html#installing-c-h-i-p-sdk) with setting up Virtual Box + Extension pack and installing vagrant on my Windows 10 (Git was already installed).

After everything was installed I started the VM wich was setup by vagrant and ran the chip-update-firmware.sh script to start the upgrade, but it failed with “Waiting for fel……………………………TIMEOUT”.
The reason was, that regardless of the USB-rules in the Vagrantfile, the CHIP was not available in the VM. Easy to check with “lsusb”. No Big deal – As the VM is available in the VirtualBox Manager we can boot it up from there and just attach the CHIP-USB-Device to the VM.

waiting for fel…OK -> 🙂
BUT:
waiting for fastboot……………………………TIMEOUT
-> 🙁

So, it seems that after the reboot of the CHIP windows is not recognizing it the right way and also has some problems to pass it through to the VM.

I dind’t find a fix for that problem, but reportedly a physical Ubuntu installation should would (regarding to some forum post on the NextThing BBS). Too bad I only have Fedora on a laptop, but no Ubuntu – but I had a Raspberry which i was currently not using, so I gave it a try and it worked out quite nice.

I used a “Jessy lite” and installed the following packages:

[pastacode lang=”bash” manual=”sudo%20apt-get%20install%20android-tools-fastboot%C2%A0u-boot-tools%20u-boot%20cbootimage%C2%A0uuid-dev%20libacl1-dev%20liblzo2-dev%C2%A0libusb-1.0-0-dev%20libusb%2B%2B-dev%20libusb-1.0-0%20libusb-dev%20git%0Agit%20clone%20https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FNextThingCo%2FCHIP-SDK%0Acd%C2%A0CHIP-SDK%0Asudo%20.%2Fsetup_ubuntu1404.sh%0Acd%C2%A0CHIP-Tools%0Asudo%20.%2Fchip-legacy-update.sh%20-f%20-s” message=”Install packages and flash the CHIP” highlight=”” provider=”manual”/]
(I don’t think that all the packages are needed, but i got some errors and hence installed everything I thought fix those errors)
After that & a reboot of my CHIP i was able to access it again with:

screen /dev/ttyACM0 115200

 

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Next Thing – C.H.I.P – Driver cant be installed

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UPDATE – 20181203:

or just use the microsoft driver as described on reddit – https://www.reddit.com/r/ChipCommunity/comments/5hndoj/setting_up_the_chip_under_win10_walkthrough/  

 

Today I got my new CHIP (https://nextthing.co) dev board/mini pc and tryed to set it up, but as I found out thats quite tricky to do.

Regarding to the documentation the chip only needs to be connected to a pc with a micro USB cable and is automatically installed as  serial device. After the installation the chip should be accessible via a COM-port with putty or any other program for serial communication.

So far so good, BUT … as I had to find out, the driver didn’t got installed and so it wasn’t accessible …

By default Windows should identify the device automatically and install the CDC Composite Gadget driver out of the box. But in my case it didn’t work.
It seems that the identfier canged from A4A7 to A4AA:
cdc-hw-id

After some some googleing I found a driver on kernel.org which nearly worked.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/usb/linux-cdc-acm.inf

But it would have been too easy if it worked out of the box. So I had to adapt the *.inf-file to match my HW-ID.
Change the follwoing lines

[pastacode lang=”python” manual=”%5BDeviceList%5D%0A%25DESCRIPTION%25%3DDriverInstall%2C%20USB%5CVID_0525%26PID_A4A7%2C%20USB%5CVID_1D6B%26PID_0104%26MI_02%2C%20USB%5CVID_1D6B%26PID_0106%26MI_00%0A%0A%5BDeviceList.NTamd64%5D%0A%25DESCRIPTION%25%3DDriverInstall%2C%20USB%5CVID_0525%26PID_A4A7%2C%20USB%5CVID_1D6B%26PID_0104%26MI_02%2C%20USB%5CVID_1D6B%26PID_0106%26MI_00%0A” message=”” highlight=”” provider=”manual”/]

to

[pastacode lang=”python” manual=”%5BDeviceList%5D%0A%25DESCRIPTION%25%3DDriverInstall%2C%20USB%5CVID_0525%26PID_A4AA%2C%20USB%5CVID_1D6B%26PID_0104%26MI_02%2C%20USB%5CVID_1D6B%26PID_0106%26MI_00%0A%0A%5BDeviceList.NTamd64%5D%0A%25DESCRIPTION%25%3DDriverInstall%2C%20USB%5CVID_0525%26PID_A4AA%2C%20USB%5CVID_1D6B%26PID_0104%26MI_02%2C%20USB%5CVID_1D6B%26PID_0106%26MI_00%0A” message=”” highlight=”” provider=”manual”/]

 

In short: replace A4A7 with A4AA 😉

Afterwards the driver could be installed and the chip should work (as long as you do not have Windows 10).
If you try to install the driver on a Windows 10 machine, Windows will complain about the unsigned driver and will not install the driver.
To get it work on Windows 10, the OS needs to be rebooted in option mode:
shutdown.exe /r /o /f /t 00

When Windows starts up again the driver signature check could be disabled for this start and after the system is up again it’s possible to install the driver.

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