Resolved Issue when loading firmware when using Ubuntu and the Techzoen Remix

Now I am not sure if this the correct forum for this but as this problem covers a number of issues across various things it seemed the best place to put it.

Having received my electronics from Techzone this morning, I approached with some care having seen reported issues here before. But the delivery was quick (allowing for holidays and customs), so I was happy with that.

Built the cable to link the USB-TTL to the Motherboard very carefully, checked all connections with a Multimeter and then again when the cable was connected between the two.

All was well. Connected the USB to the computer and the power light came on and the red led flashed. Ever better.

Checked there was a firmware in place which there was (using the instructions on the wiki), and so attempted to upload the latest 5D firmware and the problem started.

I was getting this as an error message
avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding

or this

avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding

Depending on when the reset button was pushed (although pressing the reset button is not suppose to be required).

Checking around various websites explained nothing, so I checked cables etc again. Finally I thought, lets give the extruder a good and that updated the firmware with no problems what so ever. Perfect I thought, the motorboard is broken.

Turns out this is not the case.

There appears to be an issue in the Ubuntu Release of Ardunio which you down load from the PPA. Reading through a support page it appears that the stk500 programmer does not work very well. When I changed the sanguino configuration to use ardunio as the programmer the firmware uploaded to the motherboard without and issue. (This is done in /usr/share/arduino/hardware/Sanguino)

diff boards.txt boards.txt.bak
4c4
< sanguino.upload.protocol=arduino
---
> sanguino.upload.protocol=stk500

To find out the command that the ardunio IDE is using (which I didn't know), hold down the shift key whilst doing an upload and it give a far more verbose output.

So the summary after 4 hours of head scratching is that I have a fully working techzone remix motherboard and a fully working extruder board, with respect to the ability to upload firmware.

Hope this information helps some one in future. It would have saved me sometime tonight.

If any one know of any other fix with respect to this, I would be happy to know about it.

Cheers

David

This is a good find. All the officially supported board types (in /usr/share/arduino/hardware/arduino/boards.txt specify the arduino protocol, it is only Zach's sanguino config file that specifies the stk500 one). I'm guessing, but I suspect this is most likely a historical artifact, and the sanguino config files have not been kept fully updated.

In contrast to the difficulties you had, my Seeeduino Mega was trivial to upload to using the Ubuntu arduino package -- probably because it uses a 1280 chip, which is already supported by that package and so does not use Zach's add-on configuration info.

There is a wiki page about firmware issues like this, and this issue and its solution should be added to it. If only I could remember the page name... found it: Firmware_FAQ . Please do add this to it.

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Jonathan

I will update the firmware page

Cheers

David