!B: Boot Sequence Status Messages

FAST Serial Protocol: Overview & First Steps

This documentation section is about the FAST Serial Protocol (FSP) commands, which are the low-level commands a host computer sends to a FAST board. Most FAST Pinball makers do not need to know about these details, since the pinball game framework (such as the Mission Pinball Framework) handles this communication for you.

If you're writing your own game framework, we have a series of programming guides. Also, be sure to read the overview of how FSP works and how to connect first.

The !B: messages are only sent from the FAST Controller to the host PC. If you have a host PC connected to a FAST Controller as the FAST controller is booting up, you will see these commands come through. (But if you miss them, that's ok, these are just early status messages.) The responses received will start with an ‘!’ character and will be 6 bytes in length (including the <CR> carriage return at the end of the line).

Return Values

The typical responses will be one or more of the following:

• !B:00 = Boot message power up

• !B:02 = Boot message starting application

• !B:F0 = Boot message no application (No application found) 

• !B:F1 = Boot message bad boot header (Something wrong found in the application)

For more information on how the bootloader works, please contact us for specific bootloader documentation.

Next Up: CH: Configure Hardware

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