Re: [avrdude-dev] Programming an XMega

[Joerg Wunsch]

As Weddington, Eric wrote:

> The protocol for programming any XMEGA device is not publicly
> available.

No, I think the programming protocol itself is documented.  See, for
example, section 29 of the Xmega A manual.

I don't know whether anyone has ever tried to build a selfmade tool
for PDI programming though, so it's not clear whether this description
in the datasheet is accurate and complete enough to program an Xmega
based on it.

> You'll have to use the free, but proprietary, tools from Atmel,
> which means using them on Windows.

AVRDUDE has some basic support for programming Xmega devices through
PDI using some of the Atmel tools, namely STK600 (probably not very
interesting as a gang/production programmer), JTAGICE mkII, and AVR
Dragon.  There might be hidden traps though, as Xmega support is still
more infant than megaAVR/tinyAVR support.  I remembe a couple of open
bug reports in the bug tracker, regarding certain memory sections that
are not handled as they ought to.

Likewise, basic JTAG programming support does exist as well, as it is
not very different from classic megaAVR/tinyAVR devices.

(What is completely uncovered by opensource tools due to lack of
documentation is *debugging* support of Xmegas.)
-- 
cheers, J"org               .-.-.   --... ...--   -.. .  DL8DTL

http://www.sax.de/~joerg/                        NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)