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I am not entirely sure whether this question would be on-topic here, but I am stuck on this issue unable to find any relevant answers online in any other sites.

I am working on a pet project which includes using SPI NOR (I am going with 16MB Winbond W25Q128 SOIC-8 chip). This chip will be used for bootloader storage.

Now I got my hands on STM32 based programmer for SPI chips (SOP8-SOP16, see pics below). However this programmer seems to work only with software provided by whoever designed it, which is only available on Windows XP (attempting to run it on Win7 results in it working, but machine complains about libusb drivers that it installs). I do not have any Windows machines, I mostly use Mac since it was enough before (I also have a few headless Linux boxes at my disposal). But Mac (nor Linux) do not recognize this programmer.

So my question is what are inexpensive programmers that I could easily use for writing/dumping SPI memory on Mac or Linux? (I have read that dediprog ones work on Linux, but their price-tag is way out of my budget).

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    \$\begingroup\$ Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about. But I found this with google: github.com/mytbk/xtw100. It requires python and pyusb. Probably is cross-platform. Maybe works with your device. Probably needs to be tweaked to your needs (do you know python?). Maybe burns everything down. \$\endgroup\$ – dim Jan 8 '18 at 13:09
  • \$\begingroup\$ @dim this appears to be what I actually would need. It works fine on Linux (on Mac though it doesn’t seem to work at all) \$\endgroup\$ – Alexey Kamenskiy Jan 8 '18 at 13:56
  • \$\begingroup\$ Cool! On Mac, maybe you need libusb installed, or something like that. And good luck with your project... \$\endgroup\$ – dim Jan 8 '18 at 13:59
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    \$\begingroup\$ @dim I have libusb installed as I need it for some other stuff, but seems python pyusb doesn’t work on Mac (and I see many people complaining about that on their github). Anyway as long as I can make it work on Linux it is good. Maybe you can post your finding as an answer. If there is no better answer later on I will accept yours then. \$\endgroup\$ – Alexey Kamenskiy Jan 8 '18 at 14:05
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It seems that somebody has already written some software in python to interface this exact dongle (labelled WTX100, apparently a relatively popular, cheap SPI programmer), without needing any part of the original, closed-source software:

https://github.com/mytbk/xtw100

So you need python with the pyusb library, and then you'll probably need to tweak this program to your needs, but it seems you have the possibility to use your dongle from non-Windows operating systems.

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