Mendel FiveD firmware does not respond

Hello,

I've finished building my Mendel machine, but I have trouble getting the official FiveD firmware to work (I'm using the most recent "official" release from Sourceforge, 20100308).

While I can upload the firmware fine through the Arduino IDE, it does not respond to any commands (this is both with the auto-reset jumper in place and without it). For example, I can connect to the firmware, which will make it print "start" to the serial console, but when sending a command (such as "M105" as a quick test), it does not reply. I've triple-checked the baudrate and everything, but no matter which program I use (ReplicatorG, RepRap Host or a plain simple Terminal program), nothing can squeeze a reply out of the board. However, since my USB/TTL board (the Sparkfun one) has rx/tx LEDs, I can see that my test commands get sent, but the board does not send anything back.

Funnily enough, the Makerbot firmware fork works fine.

I've found a couple of threads on this board about similar issues, but none contain a solution, just unhelpful "Oh, I managed to fixed it"s.

Does anybody have an idea what could be going wrong?

PS: This might have better been placed in the "Firmware" forum, but since there are almost no threads there, I decided to post it in this forum instead.

The Arduino serial console doesn't send CR/LF's, so the 5D firmware doesn't recognize that a command is sent. Try Ralith's gcdump util if you want to send gcode straight up, or any terminal program that sends CR/LF's.

The Makerbot firmware has a bit of a hack to ignore the lack of CR/LF's in the Arduino serial monitor.

Thanks Wade. I've already figured out the CR/LF issue with the Arduino Serial Monitor, but my problem turned out to be something else: The release of Arduino 0018 apparently broke Serial support for Sanguino, but there's a downgrade on the Sanguino website that "fixes" this until the problem has been tracked down.

Thus, while I used the prepackaged Makerbot firmware that comes with ReplicatorG, it worked well, but when I compiled FiveD myself, Serial was broken. Installing the downgrade fixed this, and I'm happily printing calibration objects as we speak :-)