The boards are on their way! They just shipped out today, which meant that I needed to get started with ironing out the programming procedure. I used my CC3200 launchpad to approximate the incoming CC3200MOD breakout and successfully programmed the chip with an external SiLabs CP2102 programmer.

After reading the CC3200MOD data sheet, I gathered that it requires a 3.3V UART signal for programming. On the software side, TI provides a programmer, called Uniflash, that supports programming over a COM port at 921600baud. Uniflash has a special version for the CC3200/3100 chips. It can be found here:

http://www.ti.com/tool/uniflash

I briefly searched around and found this nice cheap CP2102 breakout board on amazon for about $7. There's several options to choose from, so I just picked a board with good reviews.

CP2102 Programmer

A look at the data sheet shows that it is only rated for 1Mbps. At 921,600bps, the TI programmer will be pushing it. The launchpads all use the FTDI FT2232D. They have a higher rated TTL baud rate of 3Mbps and seem to have better support. However, FT2232 breakouts run almost $30. So I went with the CP2102 to see if it would work. I wasn't disappointed.

Here's the CP2102 programmer I got in the mail

You can see it's missing some pin headers. Also, from reading comments and looking at the board, you can see that there is not voltage on the Vcc pin.

After an initial failed attempt, I went to the local hackerspace to troubleshoot. Check out the analog scope

Here's the programmer hooked up to the launchpad. This is after I took the time to install some pin headers. I also connected Vcc to 5V so that it could power the board on its own.

I saw that the UART was UARTing, so my attention moved to my setup. Long story short, there were a few issues. I had to switch a few of the launchpad's jumpers. Most importantly, I had the wires all mixed up!

In the end the programmer worked pretty well. There were a few times where the CP2102 failed on the verification stage. I also saw one instance where it had a bad connection and took a long time to load the MCU image. Still, after a restart, my test program worked exactly as it was supposed to.

Overall, I'm convinced this setup will work fine with the breakout board that's on its way.