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Dear All,
I am in need of a device using which we should be able to load a firmware into large number of controllers at a time.
e.g.: suppose I have 100 controllers to be loaded with firmware, I should be able to plug the controllers into slots (atleast 15) at one end and the device will be attached to PC at the other end from which it take the firmware.
You can get ethernet-to-RS232 and USB-to-RS232 converters with at least 16 ports each;
You can also get multi-port PCI cards.
Or maybe you could connect them all in one long JTAG chain...?
Thanks for u r reply. Can you give some more information
It can work quite ok with a shared buffer, if the serial interrupt knows about framing characters in the received message, and can ignore reception of new characters until an answer has been sent, or until the main application has flagged that the received message is broken - in which case it might be good to design the protocol with a NACK message.
To do it without any synchronization can lead to very hard-to-catch problems.
Sorry - totally wrong thread...
Anyway - Google should be able to help you with different brands of multi-port adapters or ethernet-to-RS232 or USB-to-RS232.
Just a note - what application will you use for the updates?
You have to check the limits for supported number of serial ports. Some applications only supports COM1 .. COM4.
And some applications may not allow multiple copies to run at the same time.
And running 15 individual instances of an application can be very confusing, and lead to units being missed.
The best solution is to write your own application to handle all the serial ports in a single interface, with a progress bar and red/green indication for each individual connection. Possibly at the same time having an interface for printing a serial number label and writing a log entry to a database with timestamp, serial number and downloaded firmware version.
With a custom application, you could also modify each binary before download, to make the binary contain the serial number of the unit - or possibly download the serial number into EEPROM.
Perhaps you should be looking at companies like this:
http://www.iss.se/?id=418
Or, if you're not up for investing in that yourself, outsource (subcontract) the task.
Remember: your entire production output will depend on this - do you really want to homebrew it with, apparently, no prior experience...?