Ai Dreams Forum
Robotics => Robotics News => Topic started by: Tyler on May 13, 2009, 11:00:03 pm
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Update Your Robot's BIOS in a Flash
Anyone using PC motherboards for robotics has experienced the pain
associated with needing to update the BIOS. Most
board manufacturers don't provide update software that
works on any modern OS. Usually you have to create a bootable disc with
something like MS-DOS
on it! The fine folks at the Coreboot
project have a solution. They took some time out from working on
their free software replacement for proprietary BIOS to create Flashrom, a utility program
for writing, verifying, and erasing flash ROM. It runs on GNU/Linux,
FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and other Unix-like OSes. It
talks to parallel, LPC, FWH, and SPI interfaces allowing it to support
over 150 families of flash chips (so far), as well as 75 different
chipsets and multiple flash controllers. It's scriptable and doesn't need a
keyboard or monitor to be present. As an added bonus it's faster than
the proprietary flash tools it replaces. So check out the list of
motherboard supported so far and give it a try! via
LinuxDevices
http://robots.net/article/2830.html