LCP2103 initialisation setup - comms problem

[aussiekinga]

i have just been given a LPC2103 board to do a university project on, and honestly dont know much about the board yet, as ive never used it, or similar, before.

I have had trouble with the recommended Philips LPC2000 flasher (it wouldnt move from a 2106 to the 2103), and read a post recommending Flash Magic. with the Philips flasher they recommended doing "Read device ID" first.
Is the Flash magic equivalent the "Read Device Signature", and if so, when doing that it comes up with a failure (failure to autobaud - step 1), which suggests to me it isnt communicating with the board correctly.
There was another post that had about this failure, but it appeared to be with inputting of code, whereas i have no code that i am trying to download to the micro yet.
aditionally, I am using a usb to 232 cable, straight to the mirco.

any suggestions of what to do?

hopefully someone can help, as all reading this can probably tell, i dont really know much of what im doing just yet.

[Andy Ayre]

The Philips LPC2xxx ISP tool was discontinued a few years ago and is no longer developed or supported, so it isn't recommended.

Before performing any ISP operation Flash Magic always tries to read the device signature (device ID) to make sure it is talking to the correct device.

How are you placing the device into ISP mode? Are you using push buttons on the board to do that or some other method? If you are unsure check the user manual from NXP for the device for details then check the schematic diagram of the board to see what it does in this respect. Also check the manual for the board.

USB to RS232 cables tend to cause a lot of problems. Can you temorarily try a PC with a built in COM port? I wouldn't be suprised if it started working.

Andy

[aussiekinga]

thanks for that.
changed computer to use one with a free COM port and it worked fine. so it was just the usb cable.