Hi all,

Just a first post I thought I'd make here, since I came here looking for details of programming problems. I spent an entire day trying to figure out how to program the 89LP214 and realized many people have problems with SPI programming... So thought I'd make this post to help others with the same trouble.

First of all, thanks to eveyone who's had problems with programming through SPI before and posted about it here. I didn't find anything here that helped, but looking through other people's problems still helped me to solve the problem I had.

I recently obtained some AT89LP214's and wanted to program them. All the programmers I bought online failed, so I decided to make my own using an AT89S8252 which has a SPI.

It was a bit of a pain, and originally I had ideas to make the MC do the heavy lifting, then realized I didn't have to.

So I created a simple single-byte markup language that is human readable, and used the '8252 to just translate - It takes serial input, buffers it ( up to 128 bytes, but can do more ) then can transfer it to the SPI, reads the SPI output, and returns this to the buffer, which can be dumped out in hex by a single byte command.

The result was a SPI encapsulation layer in HEX, with human readable format, that can take normal .HEX outputs and, with a few minor changes, program up a chip. I have successfully talked to the AT89LP214 now and entered programming mode, and the programmer is device independent and should also be able to talk to SPI slaves as well as run a SPI bus from a serial port.

Anyway, the protocol is simple enough to type in by hand and see what the results mean even in a serial terminal program. ( it takes RS232 input, and bridges to SPI ). Better still, it's so simple that it doesn't need to know the programming specifics of a chip prior to programming it - so it will cope with different chips and even SPI devices just fine.

Also, it's possible to just cut and paste the program into the serial terminal and program that way - since it's all human-readable. But being able to manually craft what's supposed to happen on the SPI interface makes it handy for troubleshooting SPI too.

So if anyone is having programmer troubles and needs a good simple SPI programmer, happy to help - Though you'll have to be able to program at least some SPI capable chip like an 89S8252 to begin with.

Otherwise, if anyone likes this idea and wants to assist with further development ( eg, Windows user-friendly interface, or programmer front-ends ) or even ideas or wishes they'd like to see included, please reply here.

Thanks
David.