hello, I am trying to get understand programming on the caravel board, and was able to program the flash via the usb connection via the FTDI with the

caravel_board/firmware/blink/

and

caravel_board/firmware/matt_test

. Unfortunately, I ran into an issue with the

matt_test

halfway through, and it looks like I'm not longer able to detect the

Winbond

SRAM.. This is what the output looked like from running

sudo make flash

in

matt_test

(I believe have to use sudo to allow python to write to the usb port in wsl) I've attached what

sudo make flash

used to do (before and after) running

matt_test

Did I brick my board somehow? If not, how do I recover programming it correctly?

You can never actually "brick" the board, but recovering does require the slightly awkward sequence of holding down the reset button, power cycling the board (unplugging and re-plugging the USB cable) while the button is still held down, and then reprogramming the flash. Once the

make flash

says the flash is erasing, then you can let go of the reset button.

thanks! that was awkward. took me a few tries to realize i needed to keep holding down the reset until I tried to program 😅 it's a little extra awkward for me since I need to reattach the usb to wsl after the power-cycle too. Thanks! This worked

The intent was to keep GPIO 1-4 free to be used by the SPI interface and to leave those GPIOs configured for SPI use so that you can always access the chip through the SPI from a host computer. But if GPIO 1-4 ever gets written with a configuration incompatible with the SPI, then you're stuck with the awkward power cycling method.