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To make a long story short:
The ATMEL chip has a boot loader in ROM which is activated by a bit in flash. With the original firmware running the boot loader can only be activated by a complete flash erase. This is available through shorting two pins on the programming connector. WP 34S contains a keyboard command to switch to boot mode for re-flashing the device.
Software to download a new firmware to the device through the serial port is available on our SF site. I'm using the Windows "MySamba" program for this, an adaption of code originally provided by HP. A team member has ported the software to various operating systems.
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Hi Bernhard,
I didn't spot this before replying to your email. Once you have my board installed, you don't really need to send the calculator to marcus for first time flashing. All that is missing from my board is the erase button (the calculator comes with a reset button). The erase button IS needed for first time programming, but you can simply short out the two pads on the connector. Since this is only required once, it is not really a big problem in my opinion.
Regards,
Harald