[LinuxBIOS] Willem EEPROM Programmer

[Corey Osgood]

responding to both emails at once...

Luc Verhaegen wrote:
> On Sun, May 13, 2007 at 09:28:39PM -0700, roger wrote:
>> On Mon, 2007-05-14 at 00:02 -0400, Corey Osgood wrote:
>>
>>> BTW, anyone have experience with using a Willem EEPROM programmer under
>>> linux? I haven't been able to get the darn thing to work through wine,
>>> nor will it work on Vista. I'm starting to wonder if it's just a bum unit.
>> I believe there is something called firebrand that will write using the
>> parallel part.  And contacting sales at the main store selling those
>> things, I was recommended using the parallel port one vs the usb one --
>> probably because the only s/w support is firebrand.
>>

I've had a look at firebrand, but the problem is it only supports a few
27xxx model EEPROMs. No good when I'm trying to flash a 29F002, and I
personally don't feel like rewriting it, at least not at the moment. I
did find some info on getting the windows software to work with wine on
some willem forum, but it keeps telling me the device can't be found.

> 
> I don't have too good an experience with willem.org.
> 
> * It's not a registered company, there's no VAT number. Since the 
> proprietor is dutch, he should have a VAT number, yet he doesn't. This 
> is really selling things out of the back of a truck here.
> 
> For your average consumer, this makes little difference. But for me, i 
> paid dutch VAT which i can't reclaim, this money also comes out of
> taxed income now, so not fun at all.
> 
> The overhead to create and run a small company in a country like .nl 
> shouldn't be too great. But this person just installed oscommerce and 
> thought that that was it.
> 
> One day .nl VAT/taxes will catch up with him.
> 
> * It took a very very long while for my programmer to be delivered, in 
> the end, another model was sent. Paid 28/01, received 12/03. Eindhoven, 
> where this person is based, is about 120kms away.
> 
> As for the hardware:
> * usb is at most only there as a powersupply. Which is not correct as 
> the amps drawn should be negotiated between host and endpoint. There's 
> no means to negotiate anything. Yes, people abuse usb like this a lot.
> * As far as i understood the willem, from a quick look at it, you still 
> shift in a bit at a time, which makes the willem _extremely_ slow.
> 
> To be honest, i haven't needed it yet, hotswapping is much much faster
> anyway and hasn't gone wrong yet.
> 
> So don't bother. You're only throwing money away. Just buy some roms.
> 

Too late, bought it about a month ago. Flashrom doesn't work on this
particular board, and besides, a dedicated programmer *should* be faster
than booting up, flashing, and then rebooting (unless you stripped a
distro down to nothing just for that purpose). It's almost guaranteed
that it'd be faster than this system: boot up, copy rom from usb to
floppy, reboot from disk, flash, reboot again. Also, I bought it from a
canadian company (mcumall), and through ebay, no dealings with any dutch
companies ;) Afaik, the Willem schematics are free for the taking, so
anyone can build and/or sell one. I think I'm about to find a windows
98se cd and install that on whatever I can find, and see if this thing
actually does work.

-Corey