personal notes on getting ucLinux on an AnalogDevice's Blackfin BF548 CPU, mounted on a Bluetechnix DEV-BF548 board

hardware

April 2010
Bluetechnix GmbH (Vienna, Austria, http://www.bluetechnix.at/, also known as tinyboards.com ) designed and ships a CPU core module (http://www.bluetechnix.com/goto/cm-bf548) CM-BF548 . Together with a dev board, which adds a few I/O buffer/drivers and mainly extends the numerous I/O pins on the CPU to suitable connectors. They also devlopped their own bootloader "Blacksheep", which seems mostly useful with Windows applications. They do ship the board with u-boot pre-installed.

Docs exists, but are scattered between websites run by AnalogDevices, ucLinux and Bluetechnix. Sometimes outdated, sometimes incomplete, mostly not very straight forward to find.

bootstrapping -or getting out of the swamp

Suppose you have such a board, previous experiences with boot-strapping non-X86 machines and not much time or patience to get this run. My two cents:

Analog's BF548 CPU reset vector points to an internal ROM, which directly supports loading and booting of external loaders via UART. So, this works independently from any installed, missing or wrecked boot-loader in the eeprom.

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