Hi All,

Today I'll be writing about downloading the OS design onto the eBox.

After the runtime image is generated from the OS design, the development station needs to establish connectivity with the target device to download the image to the device.

The three common methods of connectivity are

(1) Ethernet

(2) USB

(3) Serial.

For our example we will the Ethernet as our connectivity option. This method uses static IP to establish connection with the eBox.

Step 1: Configuring the static IP for the eBox-4300

All eBoxes are preconfigured to boot to DOS and launches a selection menu with four options, when powered up. The third option, loads the OS image from the development station with static IP 192.169.2.232. In case your device has more than three options select the one that says: Load OS image from development station with static IP 192.168.1.232.

The static IP on the eBox can be changed to a different IP address. For doing this, use a text editor to edit the autoexe.bat, located in the eBox 4300’s flash storage. Locate the following line of code Set NET_IP=192.168.1.232 and change the IP to your desired value.

Step 2: Configuring static IP address for the development workstation

In order for the development workstation to communicate with eBox, the IP address for the development workstation must be configured to 192.168.2.xxx, where the value of xxx can be any value from 1 to 255, except 232, which is used by the eBox.

1. Launch the Control Panel from the development workstation’s start menu.

2. From the Control Panel double click on the Network Connections icon to bring up the Network Connection Properties screen.

3. Right click on the Local Area Connection icon and select Properties, to bring up the window shown below.

4. From the Local Area Connection Properties screen’s General tab, select Internet Protocol (TCO/IP) and click on properties, to bring up the properties screen.

5. From the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) properties screen, click the “Use the following IP address” button and enter 192.168.2.xxx for the IP and 255.255.255.0 for the subnet mask.

Click OK to save the settings.

Step 3: Configure the target device setting

From the IDE select Target/Connectivity option to bring up the screen shown below.

Click Add Device to bring up the new target device screen. Enter the name of your device (CE Device) as the new target device.

To establish Connection with the eBox, from the Target Device Connectivity Options screen, click on the Download Settings tab to bring up the Ethernet Download Settings window as shown below.

Now power up the eBox and select the Ethernet download option as described previously, if the settings were done correctly the window will show your eBox the Target device boot name tab at the top of this window.

This indicates that the device setting is properly done, click OK and then click Apply on the Target Device connectivity options screen.

Step 4: Go to Target/Attach device in the IDE main screen the image should start downloading

If the download does not start turn off the eBox and power it on once again. You will see the boot options with a similar menu.

1. Load nk.bin OS image from local storage.

2. Load OS image from development station with DHCP service.

3. Load OS image from development station with Static IP 192.168.2.232.

4. Clean Boot (no commands).

Option 1: The eBox-4300 will load NK.bin (CE 6.0 OS image) from local storage.

Option 2: The eBox-4300 will load eboot.bin which in turn will send request to an available DHCP server to assign an IP address. Then, it sends bootme request to the Platform-Builder development station to download the nk.bin OS image.

Option 3: The eBox-4300 will load eboot.bin with a static IP address (192.168.2.232), and sends a bootme request to the Platform-Builder development station to download the nk.bin OS image.

Option 4: Boots up to a clean DOS environment.

If the development station and eBox-4300 are connected to a LAN with DHCP service, select option 2. If eBox-4300 is connected directly to the development station using a cross-over Ethernet cable, select option 3. If you are using the cross-over Ethernet cable with option 3, you need to set your development computer’s IP address to 192.168.2.xxx, where xxx can be 1 to 255 except 232 (192.168.2.232 is used by eBox-4300 with option 3), and subnet mask to 255.255.255.0

After the image download process is completed, eBox 4300 will load the Windows CE image it just received.

So, here we have our first OS running on the eBox.

Note: This image will be lost once you restart the device again because this is still not stored on the ebox's hard drive, for now do not bother about it because you will be adding and deleting components quite often from the image.

I will be writing about SDK development next.

Thanks all for reading