Olimex USB Tiny H JTAG Debugger

[tlu]

Has anyone on here have any experience with the Olimex USB Tiny H JTAG Debugger? It's advertised to be able to do ARM, AVR, MSP430 and PIC architecture. I'm fairly new to the jtagging scene and would like to know if this is the jtag device I should purchase for both ARM and PIC uC? Any comments would help out alot.

[TheDirty]

I have the old USB Tiny and it works fine for JTAG, but it does not support SWD without an adapter.  The adapter is only supported by Crossworks and OpenOCD and it's slow.  SWD is used by the smaller Cortex chips and some don't even have the option for full JTAG.

I would get a J-Link EDU or Clone.

[alm]

I agree, I wouldn't buy a JTAG programmer for ARM these days without SWD support. Not sure about PIC support. Note that only the larger PICs (eg. some PIC24 parts) will support JTAG. Not sure if Microchip also implemented a low pin count version of JTAG.

[tlu]

To alm and TheDirty, I thank both of you for your inputs and recommendation on this. I was hoping the newer tiny H model would have SWD support. I will look into this more prior to purchasing. Would the J-Link EDU or clone work with Eclipse and OpenOCD?

[Jon Chandler]

I had a very bad experience with Olimex.  I bought a USB programmer for PICs which worked ok until it was time to update the firmware.  When I tried to do this, I got an error saying something like "maximum upgrade times exceeded."

I contacted Olimex and explained the problem.  "Obviously, you've been cloning our firmware and stealing it." was the response.  I patiently explained that, no I had not been making copies of their firmware, that this unit had never been upgraded before and was in fact a relatively recent purchase from Sparkfun.  "Well, they must have used it to steal our firmware."

I really doubted that was the case and asked if their copy protection method ever failed.  "No. It is not possible."

The solution to the problem turned out to be getting a replacement PIC micro, copied for me by someone who's copy protection didn't prevent making copies!

The absolute certainty by Olimex that their copy protection scheme was infallible, and the I, Sparkfun or the world was out to steal from them cost them any further business from me.

[TheDirty]

J-Link works with OpenOCD, but then again a lot of programmers are supported by OpenOCD.  J-link has a note about possible issues with specific j-link drivers, but it's easy to change drivers and Segger has all the historical drivers on their site for download.

OpenOCD supports debuggers I've never even heard of so someone else might have a suggestion if you are just using OpenOCD.

[tlu]

Thanks for sharing that experience with us John. I have no had to deal with Olimex but they are a major brand in the industry so I'm very surprise by what you've gone through.

Thanks for the information on J-Link working with OpenOCD TheDirty. I'm mostly going to do firmware dumping with the jtag programmer/debugger so anything that OpenOCD supports is a hit for me. I'm fairly new to the jtag arena and any help or easy way of going about dumping a firmware through jtag would be very helpful.

[nctnico]

Also watch out for the cables Olimex supplies. I couple of months ago I bought a programmer from Olimex but the USB cable that came with it was bad. It took me quite some effort to figure out the problem was in a brand new USB cable.