User`s manual

Software Manual • EKF Intelligent I/O Controller Family On CompactPCI
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EKF Elektronik GmbH * Philipp-Reis-Str. 4 * D-59065 HAMM (Germany)
Tel. [phone] * Fax. [phone] * E-Mail [e-mail] * Internet http://www.ekf.de
Software Requirements
Board Firmware
To use the ports on the I/O controllers, the local firmware on the adapters must run. See
section “
Hardware Requirements
” above for correct jumper setting to make sure that. The
driver “ekf960si1" checks whether the firmware responses to messages sent to it and
whether the version of this firmware is proper to work with it. The driver won't start and
creates a log entry (viewable with the EventViewer) if one of these conditions fail.
Boards of EKF’s Intelligent I/O Controllers are delivered with the last recent version of the
firmware. Nevertheless a copy of the actual version of the I/O controller firmware is included
within each installation pack as well as a programming tool to permanently load it down to
the I/O controller.
Firmware Update
The driver setup tool provides the possibility to easy update the I/O controller firmware. The
driver must be started to use this feature. When the setup asks you for adding a new board
or updating the driver and firmware type "No" for updating. A DOS box appears and reports
about the state of the updating.
The error message
ERROR: \\.\COMxy -- The system cannot find the file specified.
in most cases signs that the driver isn't started. This may happen on WinNT systems when
the driver start mode was modified to “Manual” or the device was disabled. The latter is
possible on Windows 2000 systems also.
After the firmware was updated successfully you have to reboot the system to start the new
firmware module on the I/O controller. The firmware actual running is executed from RAM.
The utility used by the driver setup tool to update the firmware is the Win32 Console
Application “comtest.exe”, that is called with the following arguments from a command
window:
comtest -ff=<FirmwareModule> <dev>
where <FirmwareModule> is the name of the file containing the firmware module to
download and <dev> is the name of a port on the corresponding I/O controller (e.g. COM11).
This allows the aimed firmware update on a particular controller.
The call of
comtest -?