Sanguino trouble shooting

I picked up a Sanguino kit last week and the Breakout board for it. I went ahead and assembled to the breakout board rather than the smaller sanguino board.

Then, because I already had several serial devices I went ahead and ordered the P4B serial adapter to program the board. I'd seen from others that it worked quite well, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Well, when I plug a 9V wall wart into the board and flip the switch to EXT, I get the green LED lit. I don't get any blinking from the debug LED like from what I understand I should. When I go to program with Arduino 12, with the 1.3 software modifications done -- and the extra debugging options enabled for programming, I get a sync error which seems to be timing out followed by another error that looks to be a time out.

I through an LED on the TX to see if I was getting data and at the P4B and on the Sanguino board I get constant lit, with a blink off when the data comes through. The RX I get nothing. So, it looks to be receiving but not sending.

Is it typical for the boot loader to not be in place? Or would that seem like the most logical next step? I don't have an ISP programmer, but was looking at the USBtinyISP in case I do need to get one.

And in case there are typical system related issues, I'm running on an computer as follows:
Intel Q6600
Asus P5Q SE/R
Windows Vista Home Premium
4 gig OCZ DDR2 1066mhz

And a little back ground, I'm a software developer. My microcontroller experience is limited to a basic digital logic class in college. So, I'm just looking to get into this for use in some robotics experiments.

Thanks.

Matt

While I did follow the path you did. I have the smaller board that is plugged into the breakout board.

My CPU came pre-programmed with the bootstrap loader, you press the reset switch and the red led flashes indicating it's ready to load a program via the serial port via the Arduino software.

Others have indicated and it's my experence also you have to do a reset imediately before loading a sketch, otherwise it timesout and starts running what it has in memory.

Unfortunately no. The reset switch doesn't kick off the red LED. I'd tried it several times and went through everything I could find on the it. With resets before or after hitting the upload button, and trying different time intervals as well. The button doesn't seem to do anything noticeable. That's why I'm wondering if it could be the avr itself.

Here's a bit more info from Arduino. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've got two days off work this week and a really fancy paperweight on my desk at home.

Using Port : \\.\COM1
Using Programmer : stk500v1
Overriding Baud Rate : 38400
avrdude: ser_open(): setting dtr
avrdude: Send: 0 [30] [20]
avrdude: Send: 0 [30] [20]
avrdude: Send: 0 [30] [20]
avrdude: Recv:
avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00
avrdude: Send: Q [51] [20]
avrdude: Recv:
avrdude: stk500_disable(): protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0xfc

Unfortunately, I think you will need to install the bootloader (I also needed to do this) - just build a parallel port cable (see [arduino.cc] for details.

The Arduino 12 IDE can download the Sanguino bootloader in about 20-30 seconds or so.

There's an article by Adrian Bowyer on the main blog (17 August 2008) that gives more details.

Works a treat after that!

Peter

The article by Adrian Bowyer doesn't really back up your "Just" build a parallel port cable suggestion since he appears to have had a bit of a go trying to do that. :-) I'll probably try your link and see how far I get with uisp.

Mine too doesn't blink when I reset it. The green light is lit via either USB or external power so the power appears good, and I've gone over my soldering several times. Is there a way to see if the crystal is working?
I just wish there was a way to tell for sure that the chip didn't have the bootloader. The whole reason I went down the arduino road was because I didn't have a programmer and wanted to learn about microcontrollers.

Any help would be appreciated.
(I have a working boarduino and had an arduino, so the computer interface stuff is all working fine. )

Gerry Skerbitz Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
> (I have a working boarduino and had an arduino, so
> the computer interface stuff is all working fine.
> )
If you still have your arduino I think you can use it to upload the bootstrap, there was a link on here somewhere to that effect.

I thought I had found the same thing at some point, but I feel like I get to a dead end when I try to dig into details.

This:
[www.arduino.cc]
has one arduino programming the other, but not clues how to use this to do a boot loader. Just to load sketches.

And this [tinker.it]
says this:
"I kept the serial speed at 115200 so that people don

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/29/2008 11:41AM by gsker.

No thats not it.

The link to use a arduino to write a boot strap was at:

[www.blogger.com]

Need to do show orginal post with the above link.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/30/2008 01:56AM by freds.

There was no reason that that should have been so hard to find for me. (do I feel dumb)
I just went to google and typed "burn sanguino booloader from arduino" and came right to the actual page. (your link is to the comments -- but close enough!)

[builders.reprap.org]

Wow.

Thanks so much the help!
( had found the code last night, but not the blog page ).

gsker Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> There was no reason that that should have been so
> hard to find for me. (do I feel dumb)
> I just went to google and typed "burn sanguino
> booloader from arduino" and came right to the
> actual page. (your link is to the comments -- but
> close enough!)
>
> [builders.reprap.org]
> ders.html
>
> Wow.
>
> Thanks so much the help!
> ( had found the code last night, but not the blog
> page ).

Hey no problem! I will commit my share of bloppers or dumb questions/responses.

If all the tools I missplaced were snakes I would be long dead!

Ok. I think I've done it now! I did succeed in programming the chip, but the red light was blinking very slowly instead of quickly like it does on the arduino. So I read the datasheet ( instead of remembering the boards.txt file) and guessed that I needed to set the fuses to use the external clock. So I did that. I set lfuse from 0x62 to 0x60. Now it doesn't work at all. Am I totally done? Do I have to buy a new chip? The AVRISP really worked well! :-)

avrdude: Device signature = 0x1e960a
avrdude: safemode: lfuse reads as 60 (was 62)
avrdude: safemode: hfuse reads as 99
avrdude: safemode: efuse reads as FF

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/31/2008 11:00AM by gsker.