New Programmer: TL866II Plus

[elosha]

XGecu alias Autoelectric has just released the TL866II Plus with new features.

Main changes:

• minium Vcc 1.8V support – enhanced from 3.3V
• maximum Vpp reduced to 18V – down from 21V
• NAND flash support
• 512MB flash support – up from 128MB
• Pin detection (?)

TL866A/CS are no longer in production.

Regarding the device list, some ICs will be supported by the TL866II Plus only (especially Vcc 1.8V devices), some by TL866A/CS only (Vpp 21V devices) and some by TL866II Plus and TL866A only (those needing the ICSP port).

There's also new Windows software (6.70 for TL866A/CS and 7.05 for TL866II Plus).

[DavidGriffith]

I suppose we should look into adding support for this new programmer. The reduction of maximum Vpp has me concerned. I'd love to see their justification for that. Maybe an externally powered shim can allow the new programmer to do higher voltage Vpp. That's how I've seen people program old 1701 EPROMs on newer programmers.

[elosha]

Guess it is a question of voltage range and they moved it down as whole to reach 1.8V.

There was an official 1.8V device adapter for TL866CS/A, but I don't know if minipro supports that and got these devices covered.

[ee-muhammad]

My observation is that they offer separate windows PC application. I fear that this project may be incompatible with new version of programmer. Has anyone tested it?

[DavidGriffith]

@ee-muhammad to date, none of the main developers, myself included, have obtained a TL866 II+ yet. I presume it's different enough from the CS/A variants such that simply running minipro as-is won't work. A big stumbling block for getting support for this new variant going is finishing up on extracting the device database from the official controlling software.

[PeterBortas]

I have one I ordered for future possible work with proghq. Not planning to spend a lot of time with it until proghq's support for TL866 is solid, but if someone wants some quick tests run I can probably find some time for that.

[AJPoulter-Soton]

Just FYI I do have the new TL866 II Plus (by mistake, I actually ordered the CS model :-( but this is what was delivered). I can confirm that it doesn't work with the software as is (everything results in an "Error connecting to device" error). I suspect this is due to a differed USB device ID? (I've never really done much with USB - so a long way from being an expert). If I get time later on, I'll try to put it though a debugger and see what (if anything) can be done if I can spot how to fix that.

[AJPoulter-Soton]

So I was sort of right, the libusb_open_device_with_vid_pid seems to fail; but changing the vid / pid to the values for the new II+ move things on; but then we get 'IO error: bulk_transfer'. Not sure if this info has helped anyone. I'll see if I can spend a bit more time looking at this in a week or two.

[AJPoulter-Soton]

After having done a bit more digging, it seems that the TL866 II Plus isn't compatible with the TL866 CS / A (http://proghq.org/wiki/TL866#TL866_II_PLUS_is_NOT_compatible) – so it will likely be quite a lot of work to make it usable with this software.

I suggest (at least in the short-term) that an error message stating that the software isn't compatible with the newer hardware might at least help a user understand the problem… I'll see if I get chance to put something together as a PR to do that, over the weekend.

[DavidGriffith]

@AJPoulter-Soton I agree with this approach. Though, I suspect that the differences between the two products are not particularly different. I think that the II+ is initialized differently and the command structure is slightly different to account for more capabilities.

[Auctoris]

PR raised to report incompatibility if the TL866 II+ is detected.

[AJPoulter-Soton]

In a "Sunday afternoon & not quite paying attention" kind of way, I note that I've raised the PR using my personal (as opposed to academic) account (@Auctoris)... So apologies for any confusion caused.

[DavidGriffith]

@AJPoulter-Soton I suppose it was best that your personal email address was the one that went into the modification history.

[hcsaustrup]

+1 for compatibility with TL866 II+ :-)

[DavidGriffith]

All development has moved to Gitlab. See https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/minipro