In part 4, I looked at the Windows utility that can be used to program the CSL Dualcom GPRS board. It seems to be able to do this one of two ways – over the air, but also by removing the socketed EEPROM chip on the board and putting it into a programmer connected to a PC.
I don’t have one of these programmers unfortunately – it’s called a CS0355 and looks like this:
I’ve asked around to see if anyone has one, but they don’t. It looks like a generic device, but I can’t find out enough to track one down. There is a .hex file in the CS0054 package that looks like it might have PIC code in it, so this might just be a simple PIC microcontroller acting as a EEPROM programmer.
Luckily we don’t need this programmer to read the contents of the EEPROM though – not when we have a Bus Pirate.
The 93C86 is an 16K Microwire Serial EEPROM. Microwire is Microchip’s nâme for their SPI-like protocol used for their ICs. It is very similar to SPI – Chip Select (CS), Clock (CLK), MISO (DO) and MOSI (DI). It doesn’t always work on 8-bit words though, so standard SPI hardware might not work.
This is fine though – the Bus Pirate has a mode called 3WIRE which allows us to bit-bang Microwire.
First we remove the 8-pin EEPROM from the CSL Dualcom GRPS, then put it into a breadboard. We connect it up as follows to the Bus Pirate:
- Pin 1 CS -> CS
- Pin 2 CLK -> CLK
- Pin 3 DI -> MOSI
- Pin 4 DO -> MISO
- Pin 5 VSS -> GND
- Pin 6 ORG -> Pin 8 VCC (This choses either 2048x8bit or 1024x16bit operation – this is arbitrary, I went for 16bit)
- Pin 7 PE -> can be left floating
- Pin 8 VCC -> 5V
Now we fire up our terminal and connect to the Bus Pirate.
HiZ>m 1. HiZ 2. 1-WIRE 3. UART 4. I2C 5. SPI 6. 2WIRE 7. 3WIRE 8. LCD x. exit(without change) (1)>7 Set speed: 1. ~5KHz 2. ~50KHz 3. ~100KHz 4. ~400KHz (1)>4 CS: 1. CS 2. /CS *default (2)>1 Select output type: 1. Open drain (H=Hi-Z, L=GND) 2. Normal (H=3.3V, L=GND) (1)>2 Ready 3WIRE>W POWER SUPPLIES ON
First we change to 3WIRE using m, then option 7.
We then chose 400KHz, the fastest bit-banged 3WIRE can go.
CS is active high – contrary to many SPI devices. Chose 1.
Although the chip is a 5V device, 3.3V is detected as logic high by the specs, so we can stick with normal outputs.
Finally, capital W turns the 5V power supply on. The chip is now powered.
The next step is to read the data out. The chip has a convenient bulk read mode. Instead of having to do command + address + read, command + address + read, command + address + read etc. you can just do command + address + read + read + read – the chip will automatically increment the address.
Doing this with the Bus Pirate is easy:
[0b110;3 0x000;10 r:0x800;8]
Let’s break this down.
[ means assert CS to select the chip.
0b110;3 means send 110 in 3bits. If you just do 0b110, you send 8bits i.e. 00000110, which is not what we want.
0x000;10 means send 0000000000 as the address (i.e. the first address). This is 10bits when ORG is high (1024x16bit organisation).
r:0x800;8 means read 8bit values 0x800 (2048) times. For some reason I couldn’t get r:0x400;16 to work.
There’s all of the data, from the EEPROM.
If we compare the start of the data read out from the EEPROM:
0x00 0x47 0x00 0x25
with the start of the Sample.prm file:
H,47,00 25 00
It looks like we have the same data, just ordered a little differently.
I can also spot some ASCII phone numbers and IPs in there.
It does look a lot like the prm file is just a representation of the EEPROM.
geno
December 3, 2015 at 11:26pmawesome post! this really helped me understand what is going on and enabled me to dump a 93LC66 4K chip via the buspirate.
Pyrofer
February 2, 2016 at 8:46amTo second geno’s comment, thanks to this post I was able to get my bus pirate working with the 93LC66A that I could NOT get to work!
It seems that ;3 on the command and ;9 on the address were the magic tricks missing in every other guide on the net about the bus pirate and eeproms.
Thanks!