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Pre-release

This release is a pre-release and may not be stable for production use.

Firestarter EPROM Programmer

Firestarter

Command-line tool for the Firestarter EPROM programmer — an Arduino with a Relatively-Universal-ROM-Programmer (RURP) shield. It reads, writes, erases and verifies EPROM, EEPROM, Flash and SRAM chips, from a database of 746 parts across 59 manufacturers.

New here? Start at firestarter — what Firestarter is, what hardware you need, and how to read your first chip.

Table of contents

Installation

pip install firestarter

Then flash the matching firmware to your board and check it answers:

firestarter fw -i
firestarter hw

Flashing needs avrdude on your PATH.

Pre-release channel

pip install --pre firestarter
firestarter fw -i --pre

--pre opts into pre-release versions on PyPI; plain pip install firestarter only ever installs the latest stable release.

The CLI and the firmware are upgraded together. A mismatched pair fails with a timeout or a decode error — see Breaking Changes.

Usage

firestarter [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]

Global options: -v/--verbose, -p/--port to override the saved serial port, --version.

Find your chip, then read it:

firestarter search 27C256
firestarter info AM27C256
firestarter read AM27C256 dump.bin

Commands

Command What it does
read Read a chip to a file
write Write a binary file to a chip
verify Verify a chip against a file
blank Check whether a chip is blank
erase Erase a chip, where the family supports it
id Read the chip's manufacturer and device ID
info Show what the database knows about a chip
list List every chip in the database
search Search the database
fw Firmware version; -i installs
hw Shield hardware revision
vpp / vpe Read the programming rail voltages
config Read and set configuration values
dev Development and diagnostic commands, including dev test

Every command takes --help.

Configuration

Settings live in ~/.firestarter/config.json, managed with firestarter config.

You can add or override chips with your own ~/.firestarter/database.json; entries there take precedence over the shipped database. The field reference is Chip Database Fields.

Documentation

Everything else is on the Firestarter wiki — supported chips and protocols, pin maps and adapters, shield revisions, and how to test a chip against real hardware.

Contributing

See the Contributing wiki page for where to report a problem and where to open a pull request.

License

MIT

Support me

Support me on ko-fi to keep me motivated to continue to develop Firestarter.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Release files for firestarter 3.0.0b45

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for firestarter 3.0.0b45
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firestarter-3.0.0b45.tar.gz 786.3 kB Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for firestarter 3.0.0b45
File Interpreter ABI Platform
firestarter-3.0.0b45-py3-none-any.whl Python 3 none any Details

Total release size: 1.1 MB

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