I'm currently working with a board bring up for a custom hardware based on a OMAPL138 from Texas Instruments. It is fun to work with "real" bring-ups. Most of my customers use System On Modules (SoM:s) these days. You get a lot for free with those modules but a lot of the fun is stripped away.
We are going to use U-boot [1] as bootloader for this project and I will use the TMDSLCDK138 [2] implementation as a reference during my bring-up, which is a evaluation kit for the OMAP-L138 CPU.
I will also be sharing lots of code snippets and it may not be obvious where they belong. In part4, I will summary all the changes I made.
This part will focus on the very first steps of the early bring-up. Basically from the start when I first got the hardware in my hands.
Most of this post is about an interresting problem I encountered and was debugging the wrong stuff for quite a long time. As always, the solution is obvious once you understand it and it's easy to stare blindly at the wrong direction. I think it is a funny problem to share.