Posted on February 04, 2018 at 09:14Making the firmware for external memory is an insanely long process. My machine works almost an hour, assembling the firmware in one pass for 512MB memory. It is very long in manufacturing, but very quickly in access. I do not use a file system. Instead, a static structure is used. The structure branches at filling have external connection of the cropped file of format C. It looks something like this:
#define graphics_package 0
QUADSPIRAM static struct
{
uint16_t image01 [0x25800];
uint16_t image02 [0x25800];
.....
grafik
#if (graphics_package == 1U)
= {
#include 'image01.h'
#include 'image02.h'
-------------
The collected elf has a giant size, it makes a separate * .bin for external memory, using the section name as a parameter.
arm-none-eabi-objcopy -O binary -j. (partition name) (filename) .elf (external memory firmware name) .bin
Then the magic begins.
If you need one-time programming, it's better to use an external programmer - literally. The recording speed will depend only on it. For example, the popular CH341 programmer spends half an hour writing w25q128. More expensive ones can be recorded in ten minutes. And you will need equipment for soldering.
If you are a fan of the BDSM subculture, you can pour the external firmware through the bottleneck of the SW interface. This is an insanely long process, in my case more than five hours. Maybe I did something wrong, but I have no desire to understand.
The third option is to create the firmware of an external programmer using CubeMX. It's like big brothers. Full initialization of all required peripherals, including usb and fatfs. A bit of magic, and a usb connection will make it possible to record external memory at maximum speed, about seven minutes.
