Default WF32 Bootloader Behavior

Created Wed, 11 Feb 2015 17:21:53 +0000 by Richard

Richard

Wed, 11 Feb 2015 17:21:53 +0000

I'm a newbie with MPIDE and Digilent's boards, so I need some help with a frame of reference...

New WF32, can't get a basic sketch to download. Board type, serial port are configured, it looks like comms are getting to the board (e.g., LED blips), but no return traffic coming from the board. I'm running MPIDE 0150 on a Mac 10.9.5.

I suspect the bootloader may be hosed / missing, but I don't know how it should normally behave (i.e., to tell if it's there and healthy when the board is first powered). Should it have a power-on sequence with the LEDs or anything visual? Or, if I connect to it with a terminal emulator, is there an input I should be able to send and get a reply?

Thanks, Richard

majenko

Thu, 12 Feb 2015 11:09:18 +0000

One of the LEDS should blink a couple of times at power up or whenever the board resets. It sounds like the board isn't resetting to enter the boot loader. This is a known issue with the Ft232 drivers which recently disabled auto-DTR toggling in an update. You should try the latest MPIDE test version which I believe includes manual board reset code. As does the UECIDE beta version.

guymc

Thu, 12 Feb 2015 18:36:05 +0000

You can find all of MPIDE test builds (and previous releases) here:

http://chipkit.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

majenko

Thu, 12 Feb 2015 18:45:04 +0000

Cheers guy - I was on my phone when I wrote that answer and meant to dig the link out when I got home. You beat me to it, which is good, because I'd actually forgotten ;)

Richard

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 01:22:00 +0000

Hi, all.

Thanks for the feedback. I got a reply on the Digilent forum that the boot loader should come up with one solid and one flashing light in addition to the TX/RX. I'm not seeing that with even a wall wart, so I'm thinking the boot loader didn't make it onto this unit.

I'm running 0150 build and the FTDI driver that's packaged with it. I've also tried manually resetting the board during compile, with no result.

Challenge now is re-flashing it, since this is my first PIC - I don't have a PIC programmer. (I've been all AVR to-date.)

Cheers, Richard

Richard

Sat, 14 Feb 2015 19:21:33 +0000

Just to close this out, I swapped for a new WF32 board and it came up with no issue.

No idea if/how I could have killed it... is it a bad idea to pet the cat and shuffle my feet on the carpet before picking up the board? ;-)

Cheers, Richard