Installing U-Boot to the NXP i.MX RT1170 EVK Board Print

 

Use the procedure documented below to install the U-Boot firmware to the QSPI Flash on the NXP i.MX RT1170 EVK board. Having completed the installation, the i.MX will run U-Boot as a primary firmware on next reset / power on.

Please note that the installation will erase a previously installed firmware on the QSPI Flash and install the U-Boot image instead.

There is the DAP-Link debugger integrated on the i.MX RT1170 EVK board (refer to OpenSDA circuit (DAP-Link) chapter of MIMXRT1170 EVK Board Hardware User’s Guide). The U-disk feature of DAP-Link is to be used to drag and drop the u-boot.flexspi image in order to install the U-Boot firmware to the QSPI Flash:

  1. Connect the i.MX RT1170 EVK board to a PC via the J11 USB connector.
  2. Power on the board and wait for the RT1170-EVK U-disk volume to appear on the PC:

    3. $ mount | grep RT1170
    /dev/sdX on /media/user/RT1170-EVK type vfat
    (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,
    codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,showexec,utf8,flush,
    errors=remount-ro,uhelper=udisks2)

  3. Copy the u-boot.flexspi image to U-disk:

    4. $ cp u-boot.flexspi /media/user/RT1170-EVK/

  4. Setup the boot jumpers to boot from QSPI Flash:
    • SW1.3 = 1
    • SW1.4 = 0
    • SW2.3 = 0
    • SW2.6 = 0
    • SW2.7 = 0
  5. Press the SW4 button to reset the board. See the messages from U-Boot in the serial console (refer to Connecting serial console to the NXP i.MX RT1170 EVK):

    6. U-Boot 2017.09-rc1-imxrt-2.5.3 (Mar 31 2021 - 21:21:46 +0300)
    CPU: i.MX RT117x at 996MHz
    Model: NXP i.MXRT1174 EVK
    DRAM: 64 MiB
    MMC: FSL_SDHC: 0
    SF: Detected is25wp128a with page size 256 Bytes, erase size 64 KiB, total 16 MiB
    *** Warning - bad CRC, using default environment

    In: [email protected]
    Out: [email protected]
    Err: [email protected]
    Net: eth0: [email protected]
    Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
    Wrong Image Format for bootm command
    ERROR: can't get kernel image!
    =>

The bad CRC warning for the environment and the can't get kernel image error are expected on initial installation of U-Boot, since there are no neither an environment nor a Linux image saved in the QSPI Flash yet. Follow the instructions provided in Building and Installing Linux uImage on the NXP i.MX RT1170 EVK Board to install the bootable Linux image to the QSPI Flash.