Hi, I'm Norbert

Meet Norbert — a small command-line tool I wrote to program SPI NOR flash chips. Its defining trait is patience: it reads and parses the SFDP tables, verifies its work, and would rather wait a second than guess.

Hand Norbert a chip and it works out what the part is — reads the JEDEC ID, parses the SFDP tables, or falls back to a table of chips it already knows. From there it can erase the device, program an image, verify every byte it wrote, and read the flash back. It drives a bare flash chip over a Pico de Gallo bridge, so there’s no adapter board to wire up.

A normal session looks like this:

$ norbert detect
Hmm... let's see what we've got here.
Found Winbond W25Q128JV.

$ norbert program firmware.bin
Programming firmware.bin — 512 KiB at 0x000000.

  erase    [██████████████████████████]  8/8 blocks
  program  [██████████████████████████]  512 KiB/512 KiB
  verify   [██████████████████████████]  512 KiB/512 KiB

Done. Have a nice boot.

That chattiness is the point of the name: Norbert has a personality, but only in its output. Underneath, the engineering is deliberately dull — programming flash should be predictable, transparent, reliable, and, above all, boring. It won’t skip verification because a write is probably fine, and it won’t assume every chip behaves the same.

It’s early — version 0.1 — but it already recognizes a fair number of chips — anything supporting SFDP should just work —, and --quiet gives scripts machine-friendly output when you don’t want the commentary. The source is on GitHub; if Norbert doesn’t know your chip yet, teaching it one is the easiest contribution to make.