Sanguinololu - board commisioning

I have soldered Sanguinololu ver: 1.3a, programmed bootloader and it seems that succesfully programmed Sprint firmware using USB to atmega644 (I'm using 644 not 644P).

When I connect the board (without Pololus and any other devices (thermistors and endstops) connected), in pronterface, it writes:
start
Printer is now online
SD init fail

but it seems, that the board ignores any other commands. For example:
SENDING:M105

... and nothing hapens.

When I click on ECHO button, the only difference is:
SENDING:M105
SENT: M105

... but again nothing hapens.

Is it necesary to connect at least endstops and thermistors to the board in the begining of commisioning phase or it seems that there is some other problem?

Is the echo sent from the board, so it means, that atmega is working or it is just local echo on the computer?

Is there any way to debug the communication - for example is it possible to connect testing LED to some of the SPI or Ext interface pins of the board and blink it by some command to see if the board is alive and what is happening on it?

Thanks for any help

Jakub

I had problems like that i tried to move the X Y and Z steppers and nothing happend or it didn't operater they way i thought it should. I worked better when i connected the stoppends. I was using repsnapper to move the steppers.

Regards
Al

Problem solved

Source of the problems was, that I'm using atmega644 and not 644P procesor. When I tried to compile Sprint firmware, all seemed to be OK, but in the moment I tried to upload it to the board, avrdude told, that the signature of the chip doesn't response to the compiled file and it didn't upload anything.
So I tried to edit atmega644P (or atmega644p) strings in Sprint Makefile, config.h file and in the arduino/hardware/Sanguino/boards.txt file. Than I had to edit it also in the pins.h file, as there were some errors during the compile.

After these edits compiling and uploading seemed to work OK, but the board didn't communicate as I described in the first post of this thread.

So I returned all the strings I have changed back to 644P (or 644p), compiled again and I tried to force uploading over the bad signature (arduino recomended to use -F switch, but I didn't know, where to aply it).

As this is the first time I'm using arduino software, the only solution I found after two days of experimenting, was to change signature of the atmega644 procesor to signature of 644P procesor in the arduino-022/hardware/tools/avrdude.conf file. So now avrdude is happy as it seems to it, that the signature of procesor is OK and my Sanguinololu is communicating and the motors can be rotated from pronterface.

But I feel, that my solution is very dirty
Does anybody know the correct solution, what to modify in Sprint files, when 644 procesor is used in place of 644P on Sanguinololu board?

Is the 644P's second UART port (the only difference between the two procesors, AFAIK) used in the SD communication or even SD would work with 644(withoutP)?

Hope, that my findings could help to future Sanguinololu builders.

Jakub

The "correct" solution is to upload a bootloader which reports the 644 signature instead of the 644P signature. Gen7's bootloader, 644/16 MHz version, should work fine on an Sanguinololu as well: [reprap.org]

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