Which USB hub for Eclaire XL?

[+DjayBee]

@bocianu and I tried different USB hubs connected to the Eclaire and failed 100%.

In my case the Eclaire did not recognize any of the devices connected to the hub.

 

@foft had more luck with an ancient hub.

 

So: Did anyone have luck with a more recent hub which still can be ordered somewhere?

[foft]

I've been trying to fix this, with the help of the SOCkit board and a new Saleae Logic analyzer. With the SOCkit I can run the firmware under linux and thus use printf to screen and also use gdb. This really helps! With the Saleae I can capture a very long usb stream, decode it and search the packets. I had to solder on a usb socket to test though, bit of veroboard, some wire, usb socket and 2 resistor was all that I needed.

 

Anyway I managed to track down two issues.

i) The USB keyboard freezes after 70 minutes. This was a timer overflow in the firmware. I have a 32-bit 1us counter, which overflows after 70 mins. When that happens I wait another 70 mins before polling the usb again, instead of some ms!

ii) Some USB hubs not detected. I have only two USB hubs. One of them never worked. This turned out to be nothing to do with hubs, but down to USB full speed vs low speed. Most joysticks and keyboards are low speed fortunately. The issue with full speed is that I when I reset the device I then waited 20 ms, then set it back to low speed. So it was sending keepalive packets instead of SOF packets. Then when I called set address to give the device an address, th device ignored the request.

 

Please could you install the latest core and try out your usb hub again?

Edited November 10, 2019 by foft
Tried to mention some people but not sure how to do it!

[foft]

I'd completely forgotten about the possibility of using the sockit (or mister) for debugging. I wonder if I can get wudsn working on the linux side, with the ability to debug the fpga core. Does anyone know what hooks it requires? I have DMA access to the Atari ram, but guess I'd need to also do things like freeze the system clock etc.

[bocianu]

3 hours ago, foft said:

Please could you install the latest core and try out your usb hub again?

Hi!

 

It looks significantly better now.

One of two of my hubs - branded Vakoss - started to work, after update to 37. Thanks!

 

But the newer one (uGo) is still not responding. 

 

 

 

[foft]

Well 2/3 there based on my sample of three!

 

Which uGo model? I could buy one and check.

[bocianu]

10 hours ago, foft said:

Which uGo model?

UHU-1011

 

 

[+DjayBee]

I currently cannot test it because I bricked my Éclaire Mini when flashing the core. ?

It told me that it was finished but does not come up anymore since. F11+H does not help.

 

I first need to find somebody with an USB Blaster or get one myself.
Which exact type is needed?

Edited November 13, 2019 by DjayBee

[foft]

Search on eBay for ‘usb blaster’. No need for the official ones, the cheap clones are ok. Though it can take a while to ship from China so might be better to pay a bit more to order it locally.

 

If you want me to double check suitability pm me a link before you buy

Edited November 14, 2019 by foft

[+DjayBee]

☺️ I retested the board with a different display; and it works after pressing F11-H. Obviously my stupid TV switched the input before I was able to get a stable picture.

 

I already had found a working ancient passive USB 1.1 hub (silver Speednet 11101) and with core 37 my passive USB 2.0 hub (LogiLink UA0137orange) does also work.

 

Weird behaviour: When I set profile #2 to an XL with any XL-OS, it always starts Altirra BASIC 1.55. Profiles #3 and #4 start the expected Atari BASIC.

 

Edited November 14, 2019 by DjayBee