Trip report: Eindhoven
Aug. 4th, 2012 12:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izardJust got back from Eindhoven, Netherlands. It is my first non-transit trip to Netherlands, but I still have not seen anything. Flown to Dusseldorf, drove there, spent a day debugging with customer, and went back home. It all took me from 4.40AM till 11PM yesterday.
This trip was interesting from engineering point of view. I had to prepare few things on Thursday to take with me. One was a reference board with same CPU and chipset customer is using in their design. Then I got a
JTAG debugger box and software. Unfortunately few hours before the trip it appeared that there was no room for a JTAG connector on a customer board.
So I got few hours to get the connector, and then to ask a customer to solder it to specific CPU pins. I did not have any time to order a connector, so I went to a big trash bin where my colleagues scrap old motherboards, took 2 of them home, used coping saw to cut a piece of mother board with connector on it. This improvised JTAG connector almost worked :) So I was lucky in the end that I found a way to get the root cause of the hardware issue by examining bootloader logs. It takes more time than using debugger but is as reliable.
This trip was interesting from engineering point of view. I had to prepare few things on Thursday to take with me. One was a reference board with same CPU and chipset customer is using in their design. Then I got a
So I got few hours to get the connector, and then to ask a customer to solder it to specific CPU pins. I did not have any time to order a connector, so I went to a big trash bin where my colleagues scrap old motherboards, took 2 of them home, used coping saw to cut a piece of mother board with connector on it. This improvised JTAG connector almost worked :) So I was lucky in the end that I found a way to get the root cause of the hardware issue by examining bootloader logs. It takes more time than using debugger but is as reliable.
