Update Your Robot's BIOS in a Flash

Posted 13 May 2009 at 16:21 UTC by steve

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