Introduction

The CH341A is an affordable SPI programmer.

The assumed map between UIO command bits, pins on CH341A chip and pins on SPI chip:

UIO  CH341A  SPI     CH341A
0    D0/15   CS/1    CS0
1    D1/16   unused  CS1
2    D2/17   unused  CS2
3    D3/18   SCK/6   DCK
4    D4/19   unused  DOUT2
5    D5/20   SI/5    DOUBT
6    D6/21   unused  DIN2
7    D7/22   SO/2    DIN

IMPORTANT NOTE:

You must perform the 3.3V signal output modification if you are using the CH341A with 3.3V SPI chips. The CH341A has a design flaw that outputs 5V on the MISO and MOSI pins even when VCC is 3V which will almost certainly be out-of-specification for the device you are trying to program.

See this guide for more details.

Firmware Format

The daemon will decompress the cabinet archive and extract a firmware blob of unspecified format.

This plugin supports the following protocol ID:

• org.jedec.cfi

GUID Generation

These devices use the standard USB DeviceInstanceId values, e.g.

• USB\VID_1A86&PID_5512

Update Behavior

The device programs devices in raw mode, and can best be used with fwupdtool.

To write an image, use sudo fwupdtool --plugins ch341a install-blob firmware.bin and to backup the contents of a SPI device use sudo fwupdtool --plugins ch341a firmware-dump backup.bin

Vendor ID Security

The vendor ID is set from the USB vendor, in this instance set to USB:0x1A86

External Interface Access

This plugin requires read/write access to /dev/bus/usb.

Version Considerations

This plugin has been available since fwupd version 1.8.0.