Possibility of putting selected chips from the T56 support list in infoic.xml

[tkurbad]

Hi,

I remember a time when, e.g., the SHARP LH28F160S5-T@TSOP56 could be flashed successfully w/ the TL866II + TSOP-Adapter using the Linux minipro command.

Xgecu since then seems to have moved away support for all TSOP56 chips from the TL866II to the T56. Also, most 5V flash chips >= 2MB in TSOP48 package have since been removed.

Is there a chance to extract chips from the infoic2.dll that are usually exclusive to the T56 and put them as custom entries to the infoic.xml?

Can they perchance be made visible in the extraction tool in a separate section like "Danger! untested" or the like? ;-)

Thank you! Torsten

[radiomanV]

Hi, This issue should be better have been opened in the Gitlab minipro repo but, i'll take this as a question related to extraction tool in this repo . First, i was not aware about this. If this is true then the manufacturer (aka Autoelectric) is playing dirty with his customers.

Anyway, as the one who wrote a lot of code for the minipro project and have enough knowledge about low level stuff, my answer is yes, this can be easily made with one condition: the firmware support should be there. If not, then we are out of luck. Sure, some test should be made to confirm if they removed all those chips from the database or they wiped out the entire firmware support + database. But i can't find the aforementioned chip (LH28F160S5) in any earlier database. Are you sure that this is correct? Can you please name some chips removed from the TL866II database? Thanks.

[tkurbad]

Hi,

first of all, thank you for taking the time to look into this.

Second, I think I've been mistaken. Allow me to explain: I'm very much into retro-computing, Commodore Amiga computers, to be exact. They need a so-called Kickstart ROM, basically a non-JEDEC compliant 40 pin DIP chip with 512 kB, compatible with 27C0400 or MX27C4001 EPROMs.

If you take larger chips, you can use the additional address lines to switch between different ROM versions.

When I came across some 30 of the LH28F160S5-T, I built an adapter PCB to the DIP40 form factor and a "reverse" adapter with a ZIF-socket for the DIP40 layout to connect to the TSOP v3 adapter that is used on the TL866. This reverse adapter recreates the JEDEC layout for TSOP48 "topside" flash 16x1Mbit flash chips, very much like the LH28F160BJE-T@TSOP48

Now for my mistake: There never was any support for TSOP56 chips in the TL866 database. I must have dreamt that up. However, with the TL866A I owned some two years ago, I've been able to flash the LH28F160S5-T chip chosing the LH28F160BJE-T@TSOP48 definition. Under normal circumstances, this shouldn't even be possible due to the BJE chip being 3.3 V and the S5 being 5V. With the TL866A however, it worked. I since sold the TL866A and bought a TL866II because I needed support for some newer PIC MCUs. The TL866II however, seems to be more on spec voltage-wise and thus doesn't write the LH28F160S5 successfully. Erasing and blank checking works, but writing always aborts randomly with a verification error.

So, the question is: Can we take the LH28F160S5-T@TSOP56 chip definition from the T56 as a basis to modify some parameters of an existing chip definition like the LH28F160BJE-T@TSOP48 to change voltage levels and/or protocol, or must all of this be inherent to the TL866's firmware?

I already played with some of the options in the XML file. Some things, like the voltage settings through opts5, becomes obvious after a while, but a lot don't...

Let me just add that this is more of a curious question than a real issue since I meanwhile own a T56 as well and designed yet another adapter to adapt back from the DIP40 design to the original TSOP56 pin layout. This one works as expected, so I'm all set in principal terms. ;-)

[radiomanV]

As i don't have a T56 to play with, i can't tell if chip definitions will work in TL866II but clearly not without some modifications. Hmm, interesting tweak regarding voltage. The voltage can be reduced to 3.3v by tweaking some parameters in .xml database. If the read/write algorithm is the same and only the voltage needs to be reduced we are lucky. But this must be tested...

[tkurbad]

As I've started this whole messy issue, I'm of course willing (and able) to test... ;-)

But, the voltage doesn't need to be reduced, it has to be raised. The 3.3V parts (LH28F160BJE-T@TSOP48 and LH28F160BJE-B@TSOP48) are in the XML and should work with the TL866. It's the 5V chip (LH28F160S5-T@TSOP56) that's missing, supposedly because the TL866 doesn't support TSOP56.

I don't know if the protocol matches. The LH28F160S5, while apparently having been used extensively in telephony and automotive applications, is special in many regards. First and foremost, VPP = VCC = 5V, which is a bit unusual.

If you can give me some hints on the meaning of the protocol ids and opts values in the XML, I could try several meaningful combinations. Up until now, it was only (unsuccessful) guesswork on my side.

I've got some further details that might be of interest:

• As said, the chip works with VPP as low as 5 V. I solved this in my adapter by connecting VPP of the chip directly to VCC. VPP of the programmer is left unconnected.
• According to the datasheet, it supports several write protocols
• It has to be written in word mode. Byte mode won't work, because I had to pull the /BYTE pin high by default in my adapter to get down to the maximum supported 48 pins to make the TSOP-adapter for the TL866 work

So, what do you think, how should we proceed?