First of all I was confused at the beginning by no ability to load any program at all. It failed on erasing the chip. Solution: do not use programming command

$ mspdebug rf2500 "prog test.elf"

but use

$ mspdebug rf2500 "load test.elf"

because FRAM chips don’t need erasing.

After few loading rounds the big trouble appeared. It took me some googling to find this discussion. This clever guy Donald created a simple program for LaunchPad to use BSL to mass erase the experimenter board. I tried to compile and load the program on my own but without success. The red LED always stayed on. I tried it with and without soldered crystal, both failed. Then I used Donald’s prebuilt binary with soldered crystal and it worked.

Now I will wait how long it will take to break again.

Update 2012-02-09

It didn’t take very long to jam again. Actually it took about 5 rounds of programming. My frustration was huge. After lots of another trials and failures I stumbled on a little code in mspdebug/drivers/fet.c:

/* This packet seems to be necessary in order to program on the
 * MSP430FR5739 development board.
 */
if (xfer(dev, 0x30, NULL, 0, 0) < 0)
  printc_dbg("fet: warning: message 0x30 failed\n");

At least in my case it is not neccessary. I removed the code, experimenter board programming works fine and it does not jam any more. What a lucky shot

Update 2012-02-12

Well, card is blocked again. But this time it takes much more programming cycles then before. Better than nothing. Stay tuned.

Install package python-stdeb and then execute

python setup.py --command-packages=stdeb.command bdist_deb

And your DEB is ready!

First I booted into the Live CD to make the disk preparations. I splitted the disk into 3 partitions:

• 250 GB for root
• 60 GB encrypted partition
• 10 GB swap

For the encryption I decided to utilize aes-ebc-plain with key size 128 bits for its speed (I don’t need military grade safety). Partitions formatting:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
cryptsetup luksFormat -c aes-ecb-null -s 128 /dev/sda2
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda2 encpart
mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/encpart
cryptsetup luksClose encpart
mkswap /dev/sda3

First idea was to have the encrypted partition mounted directly to /home/bobalice in my final system but I wasn’t able to make the mount point owned by bobalice. So I created a directory home/bobalice on the encrypted partition and used symbolic link to “attach it”. See below. After the disk preparation I ran ordinary Ubuntu installation using the root and swap partition.

Login mount

Next step was to setup automatic mount of the encrypted partition. It was a kind of easy. I installed package libpam-mount and added lines to /etc/security/pam_mount.conf.xml:

<mkmountpoint enable="1" remove="true" />
<volume user="bobalice" fstype="crypt"
    path="/dev/disk/by-uuid/55f028b1-3306-4de6-b420-6478ea649604"
    mountpoint="/mnt/localcrypt" />

It says that only on bobalice login the mounting should be performed. I advice to use by-uuid partition reference because sd* labels are not constant. Now if I login as bobalice the partition will be mounted and ready. Next:

mv /home/bobalice/.??* /enc/home/bobalice
rm -Rf /home/bobalice
usermod -d /enc/home/bobalice bobalice

Now I have my home directory on the encrypted partition.

GDM and initial chdir

My first idea of home directory mapping was to use a symbolic link (ln -sf /enc/home/bobalice /home/bobalice) but it caused a little trouble with GDM. When I logged in with GDM it changed directory to the path on the encrypted mount, it followed the symlink. It is not a big deal but current working directory was different from $PATH.

MONTH=`python -c "import time; print int(time.time()-3600*24*30)*1000000"`
echo "DELETE FROM moz_historyvisits WHERE visit_date < $MONTH;" | sqlite3 places.sqlite
for z in *.sqlite; do echo "VACUUM;" | sqlite3 "$z"; done

This will remove items older than 30 days and maintain all the sqlite databases. Speedup is often very striking.

Compilation of source code for MSP430 is the same like in the previous article. Lets focus on debugging. I had troubles to make it working with the original MSPGCC project. In other words I didn’t make it working. But GDB 7.0.1 works better.

Mspdebug supports breakpoints only from newest versions, use git to get it (git clone git://mspdebug.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/mspdebug). It currently supports only 1 breakpoint at a time.

First run the mspdebug in a stub mode:

$ mspdebug -R gdb
MSPDebug version 0.7 - debugging tool for MSP430 MCUs
Copyright (C) 2009, 2010 Daniel Beer <daniel@tortek.co.nz>
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Trying to open interface 1 on 002
rf2500: warning: can't detach kernel driver: No data available
FET protocol version is 30000002
Configured for Spy-Bi-Wire
Set Vcc: 3000 mV
Device: MSP430F22xx
Sending magic messages for >= 30000000
Bound to port 2000. Now waiting for connection...

Then run debugger. I like DDD:

$ ddd --debugger msp430-gdb test.elf

In the debugger console run a command to connect to the stub:

(gdb) target remote :2000
0x0000e000 in _reset_vector__ ()

Now you can debug at will.

GCC

The easiest way for users of Debian and derived distributions is to add following repository to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://merlin.fit.vutbr.cz/FITkit/download/debian debian fitkit

Then run as root:

# wget http://merlin.fit.vutbr.cz/FITkit/download/debian/debkey.asc -O- | apt-key add -
# apt-get update
# apt-get install msp430-devtools

After that you will have full toolchain. Lets try to compile the following C source:

#include <io.h>
 
void wait(void)          //delay function
{
  volatile int i;        //declare i as volatile int
  for(i=0;i<32000;i++);  //repeat 32000 times
}
 
int main(void)
{
  WDTCTL = WDTPW | WDTHOLD;
 
  P1DIR=0xFF;            //port 1 = output
  P1OUT=0x01;            //set bit 0 in port 1
 
  for(;;) {              //infinite loop
    P1OUT=~P1OUT;        //invert port 1
    wait();              //call delay function
  }
 
}

Compile the source and generate output suitable for programming the MCU:

$ msp430-gcc -Os -mmcu=msp430x2234 -o test.elf test.c
$ msp430-objdump -DS test.elf > test.lst      # assembler output
$ msp430-objcopy -O ihex test.elf test.hex
$ ls
test.c  test.elf  test.hex  test.lst

It’s done!

Programming

For this purpose there is all-in-one tool called mspdebug. It was originaly created for EZ430-RF2500 but now it supports all the MSP430 programmers. I’ve tested it with the RF2500 programmer. The easiest way to program the MCU’s flash is to run the following command:

$ mspdebug -R "prog test.hex"
MSPDebug version 0.6 - debugging tool for MSP430 MCUs
Copyright (C) 2009, 2010 Daniel Beer <daniel@tortek.co.nz>
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Trying to open interface 1 on 002
rf2500: warning: can't detach kernel driver: No data available
FET protocol version is 30000002
Configured for Spy-Bi-Wire
Set Vcc: 3000 mV
Device: MSP430F22xx
Erasing...
Writing 120 bytes to e000...
Writing  32 bytes to ffe0...

It’s done!

Debugging

Next time…

Besides the PNG transparency Internet Explorer has many other holes. Missing CSS selectors, wrong box model, … I found IE7 script which patches most of those holes. So great! Now I can use selectors like DIV > DIV or DIV + DIV everywhere. It also fixes the box model (total width = margin + border + padding + width) and min-height/min-width. It tries to fix the PNG transparency too but it is not as well tuned as the iepngfix. You should remove this path of the script.

I need to decrease the memory consumption or decrease the processes count. How about worker MPM? It uses more threads than processes.

I’m running a lot’s of applications mostly with mod-python. But I need PHP for applications like phpmyadmin and Horde. Biggest issue is how to replace mod-php which depends on the prefork MPM because it is not thread-safe. Solution can be found in FastCGI. Let’s try it:

1. get rid of apache2-mpm-prefork and libapache2-mod-php5 and install apache2-mpm-worker and php5-cgi.
2. Configure Apache. You can find a lots of examples on the internet how to simply configure PHP+FastCGI. For eager beavers a quick tour:
   1. enable Apache’s action and fastcgi modules.
   2. put following lines in Apache’s configuration:

      AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
      AddHandler php5-fastcgi .php
      Action php5-fastcgi /cgi-bin/php5

Voila! Simple PHP scripts works!

But first problem arises. I can’t get into phpmyadmin. Firefox wants to download the page as PHTML. Solution is to clear the Firefox’s cache.

Another and harder problem comes. I have some .htaccess files with PHP directives (like php_flag). Now they doesn’t work because they worked only with mod-php. And generaly it will not work with FastCGI anyway. Some suggestions can be found e.g. in H-Sphere forum. Well you have to go around

I needed to work with tags <cost> with an unique attribute role in a current section. My solution works with a combination of <xsl:for-each> and <xsl:if>:

<xsl:variable name="cursection" select="."/>
<xsl:for-each select=".//cost"> <!-- get all of those -->
   <xsl:variable name="role" select="@role"/>
   <!-- id(current cost) == id(first cost in the section with the given role) -->
   <xsl:if test="generate-id()=generate-id($cursection//cost[@role=$role][1])">
     ....
   </xsl:if>
</xsl:for-each>

• use case, class, activity and sequence diagrams
• not just dummy diagrams but also some semantics
• ability to run under Linux

First I started looking in my Ubuntu distro. I found:

• Dia – great generic diagramming tool but with no semantics.
• Umbrello – basic UML semantics but IMHO only for kids
• Gaphor – I didn’t try it, it depends on Zope packages (why?!?) and I don’t want the Zope.
• ArgoUML – Yeah! What a tool! Lots of diagrams, lots of choices, nice UI. I like it. But.. wait… It has no undo/redo? Okay, no big deal, I have to be careful. It has not cut/copy/paste?? No way!

After the disapointment with ArgoUML I decided to look into commercial waters. Few bucks cannot kill me. Tools like Borland Together or IBM Rational Rose are too expensive. I need something with good power/price ratio.

• Poseidon – commercial version of ArgoUML. Has undo/redo, limited cut/copy/paste, better UI than ArgoUML but not so good to pay for it.
  
• Jude – In addition to the basic UML diagrams it has ERA diagrams, mind mapping, forward/reverse engineering of Java code…
  
• MagicDraw – my final choice.

Why MagicDraw?

Finalists were Jude and MagicDraw. Jude has more “big” features but is also more expensive ($280) and it is subjectively less userfriendly. MagicDraw won because:

• It has fancy UI and nice diagrams
• It’s cheap – “Personal Edition” costs $149.
• There is also a free “read-only” edition.
• Keyboard control.
• It has tons of (in)significant features like fullscreen, “jumps” on crossing lines, selection mode toggle (complete and partial coverage), formatting, nifty zoom/preview window, etc…

But it has also a few cons:

• I didn’t find any “non-exact-UML” elements like a circle, standalone line or bezier curve. There is only something called “rectangular shape” and “separator” which is only a horizontal line.
• Huge uncompressed saved files. I’m saving into uncompressed because of SVN – simple diffs.
• I will find more later…

Despite those inperfections I have to admit that MagicDraw is and excelent tool.

Update, 20.4.2009

I don’t know how could I miss it but I found a very similar program to the MagicDraw: Visual Paradigm for UML. Basic UI is almost the same as MagicDraw. Same toolbars, same windows, the resemblance is huge. It has a quite good pros:

• cheaper, “Modeler edition” costs $99
• free “read-only” edition
• “Modeler edition” includes more features than MagicDraw’s “Personal edition” – requirements management, ERD, …
• free-form elements – lines, circles, polygons…

It has also cons:

• Less user-friendly:
  • I miss the keyboard controlled new elements selection.
  • May be a bug but I created and activity control flow line and when I started typing guard with “[” then nothing happened. Only after a letter it started to edit the name.
• JRE is bundled in the installation (I think it is a con)
• Linux version has only Metal look and feel and the font size is needlessly big.
• Workspaces – I don’t want a full IDE. I want an UML tool where I will save a single file with my UML model and not a lots of garbage around.
• Diagrams are not very nice (at least bad font).
• missing tiny things (e.g. matrix swim lanes in activity diagrams)
• No project-specific symbol properties.
• It can’t save in an uncompressed format – not suitable for Subversion.

I think I will stay with the MagicDraw.