XMOS giving away 2500 startKITs for FREE!

Very interesting device.  I have an application that might be suitable, so I took a look at some of the XMOS documentation.  One thing that was not immediately clear is whether it's possible to talk to the device directly over the debug interface, or do users have to run XMOS software on a host?  That is, is the format and content of the messages transferred over the USB debug interface documented?

I think it's pretty nifty that startKIT can plug into RasPi.  It would be even niftier if RasPi could be used as the development platform with FLOSS tools.

That is a good question.

The connection is:

  Tile <-> JTAG <-> XTAG2 JTAG to USB key <-> gdb with libusb

Arguably this could do with more user-facing documentation; but there is only finite time.

Some links that may be helpful

* A (slightly dated) version of the XTAG2 software is on-line: https://github.com/xcore/sc_jtag/tree/master/module_xcore_debug/src, and https://github.com/xcore/proj_xtag2/tree/master/app_l1_jtag

These two together should enable you to work out the protocol on both USB and JTAG.

* https://www.xmos.com/en/download/public/Dynamic-code-loader-for-XTAG2.pdf shows how to run other things on an XTAG2.

You can also boot it over SPI; the format of the raw SPI image is documented in the datasheet of the devices.

Hope this helps

Henk

Even more interesting than giving away 2500 startKITs for free is XMOS's other announcement of the moment -- "XMOS launches startKIT: multicore development for $14.99".  That's important, I think.

Just 2500 units won't go far, but making the basic evaluation kit just $14.99 puts it right alongside the microcontroller kits released by the big boys like ST, TI, Freescale and others.  Because that kind of money is well below the radar for practically everybody including most youngsters, it could lead to an awful lot of XMOS kit in circulation.  That's very good for company exposure, much better than hiring a PR company for promotion which is a one-shot waste.