Dear All,
This is a work-in-progress thread where I suggest we will gather any tips and guidelines on how to design functioning products that use VS1005. The topic will be edited constantly.
Please study this list carefully, because all notes here are things that have caused problems or needed fixing in at least some PCB board.
Design for Debuggability. Design for Productability.
* Provide debug header on your PCB: Provide pads to solder pins for VHIGH, RX, TX and GND. Without these pins, your product may be impossible to debug or produce. Both RX and TX need pull-up resistors.
* Consider how the initial flash contents is to be loaded in production. Provide USB pins on pin headers (if your product doesn't have USB port) for pushing the operating system files to the board during production.
* For writing to the flash in system, you need a flash that has 4K sector erase capability.
* Provide a ground pin on the PCB for connecting the oscilloscope probe ground.
* SD card can also theoretically be used for initial flash programming during production.
Choose carefully which GPIO pins you use.
See the developer board schematic as guidelines. The Kernel needs to use the following pins:
* XCS0 (GPIO 1.1, the SPI flash chip select), NFCE (GPIO0.11, the NAND flash chip select) and GPIO1.15 (the LCD display chip select) for various purposes, and the kernel presumes that there is a 74HC138 address decoder connected to these pins so the kernel constantly writes to all three.
* NFRDY (Nand Flash Ready) pin needs a pull-up, otherwise booting may get stuck in waiting for a (non-existent) Nand Flash to become ready. The boot dead-locks if there is a floating/high NFCE with a floating/low NFRDY. For proper operation, always pull NFRDY high during boot.
* Some bus (usually SPI0) for communicating with a system flash memory.
* UART for console messages and debugging. Both RX and TX need pull-up resistors on the PCB. Floating RX will eventually cause a deadlock and floating TX will cause spurious transmissions at reset.
* GPIO0.7 for determining the boot voltage and GPIO0.0 - GPIO0.3 for determining the boot cofiguration and for mechanical push-buttons whenever there are some.
* GPIO0.0 - GPIO0.7 together with the chip select pins for switching external powers such as SD card regulator or USB regulator on and off: Whenever a driver calls SetPower, pins GPIO0.0 - GPIO0.7, XCS0, NFCE and GPIO1.15 are written to - if this causes problems with your board, rewrite the SetPower function in the Kernel (see here).
* GPIO0.0 - GPIO0.3, TMS, TDI and DBG are also checked by the ROM firmware at boot: if they are all high, the internal flash is erased. To prevent this from happening inadvertently, make sure that at least one of these pins is pulled low (with 10K...100K resistor) during boot.
Other buses and their pins are largely left unused (although they might get an initial value during bootup). You can use such peripherals that you don't need as GPIO pins. For example GPIO2.0 to GPIO2.3 (the JTAG pins TMS, TDI, TDO and TCK) are good pins to be used as GPIO pins.
Design for Reliability.
* VS1005G: Connect FVDD (pin 6) to IOVDD (pin 7). This is a work-around for a VS1005G boot timing criticality that causes boot problems in early VS1005G production lots.
* Provide own regulator for the SD card.
* Connect the SD card regulator to some VS1005 pin so that the SD card can be powered up, down and resetted. Otherwise it might not work at all. For 3V IOVDD systems, a good solution is to use GPIO0_7, a pull-up resistor, active high enabled regulator and the AMPBCONF.DL3 driver to control the SD card power. You can find the newest version of AMPBCONF.DL3 here: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1849#p12687. Versions from 1.02 upwards let you select which GPIO pin you are using for regulator control.
* Use somewhat smaller capacitors for the crystal than is customary. The oscillator starts more reliably with today's low power crystals when the capacitors are smaller. Instead of 30pF use something like 10pF. And don't forget the 1 Mohm parallel load resistor.
Design for Quality.
* Provide good ground and enough bypass capacitors.
* PCB ground layout considerations: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1101
* Soldering and stencil design guide: download/file.php?id=1484
* To be continued...
Important Tips and Guidelines for Designing VS1005 Products
Important Tips and Guidelines for Designing VS1005 Products
Info: Line In and Line Out, VS1000 User interface, Overlay howto, Latest VSIDE, MCU Howto, Youtube
Panu-Kristian Poiksalo
Panu-Kristian Poiksalo
Collection of instructive messages and other guidance for VS1005
About power, power control and power consumption:
VS1005 Power Consumption Measurements: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1319
Optimizing power consumption: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1319#p10309
Switching the power off: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1752
SD card resetting and power control: viewtopic.php?t=1860#p9325
Using multiple SD cards: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2160
About SPI flashs, boot images, firmware programming etc:
Flash dumping: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1897
Backuping and updating firmware: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1756&p=8584
About reflashing and unbricking: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=681
About the Breakout Board (and other minimal component count systems)
Root image for the Breakout Board: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1615#p7734
Breakout board discussion: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1614&p=8814
Even smaller root image: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1615&start=30#p9455
About VSOS input and output:
Using the VSOS UART Shell: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1615
Disabling console printouts to UART: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1992
Taking LCD screenshots: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=914
About unifont (Chinese etc) character support: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=680&p=6113#p6113
About debugging:
Tracing where the application hangs: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1970&start=70#p10258
Updated Stop tracing tools: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1970&start=70#p10258
Deciphering Stop traces: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1989&p=10147#p10146
Second UART for debugging: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2762&p=14082#p14082
About tasks and multitasking:
CreateTaskAndStack example: USB handler in background: viewtopic.php?t=1810&p=10311#p10311
Memory allocation for tasks: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1988#p10039
About VSOS internals:
Making a new disk device driver: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=723
Miscellaneous:
Making a beep using DAC offset port: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1724
VS1005 Power Consumption Measurements: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1319
Optimizing power consumption: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1319#p10309
Switching the power off: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1752
SD card resetting and power control: viewtopic.php?t=1860#p9325
Using multiple SD cards: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2160
About SPI flashs, boot images, firmware programming etc:
Flash dumping: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1897
Backuping and updating firmware: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1756&p=8584
About reflashing and unbricking: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=681
About the Breakout Board (and other minimal component count systems)
Root image for the Breakout Board: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1615#p7734
Breakout board discussion: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1614&p=8814
Even smaller root image: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1615&start=30#p9455
About VSOS input and output:
Using the VSOS UART Shell: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1615
Disabling console printouts to UART: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1992
Taking LCD screenshots: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=914
About unifont (Chinese etc) character support: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=680&p=6113#p6113
About debugging:
Tracing where the application hangs: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1970&start=70#p10258
Updated Stop tracing tools: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1970&start=70#p10258
Deciphering Stop traces: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1989&p=10147#p10146
Second UART for debugging: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2762&p=14082#p14082
About tasks and multitasking:
CreateTaskAndStack example: USB handler in background: viewtopic.php?t=1810&p=10311#p10311
Memory allocation for tasks: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1988#p10039
About VSOS internals:
Making a new disk device driver: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=723
Miscellaneous:
Making a beep using DAC offset port: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1724
Info: Line In and Line Out, VS1000 User interface, Overlay howto, Latest VSIDE, MCU Howto, Youtube
Panu-Kristian Poiksalo
Panu-Kristian Poiksalo