2012-08-04

izard: (Default)
2012-08-04 12:55 pm
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Trip report: Eindhoven

Just 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.