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Anyone Build a Yadro lately?

Hi All, This is my first post here.I=92m LT LOO from Malaysia, lately I'm on volunteer list to help some engineering vocational school student with their annual school project. With limited of money in hand we decided to scratch build a DRO base on nick Muller design to be fitted to my X2 mill as a exhibition project. And with it some other student can built and machine some parts from it with the aid of DRO to be use as their class exhibition object.

Currently sponcering all of components/scale used in it building and at the end of the day I=92ll will be keeping the DRO and reimburse the money student spend on other parts they used in the project.

In the process student learn the following process in engineering skill

1.) Design and fabricating of PCB with the aid of CAD.

2.) Electronics in enhancing mechanical machinery.( initially I though a CNC conversion would be even batter but lack of fund/skill and availability of cheap ball screw dampen the idea.)

3) embedded technology in today electronic.

4) Basic skill of machining.

We had scratch build your design base on info nick publish on his web page.

After finishing building the board (DRO int4) and scratch building of buffered STK200/300 programmer and iron some other problem with ponyprog/ twinAVR software, we=92re able to re-program the ATtiny2313-

20PU chip with out much problem.

All voltage at various test point was checked to be o.k. The next step was to test board to pc serial communication.

Booting up the old P3 900mHZ PC with dos6.22 startup disk in drive A. Run term.exe, pc echo UART to be 16550.

By power up the DROint4 board, the massage *** Welcome to yadro- land*** appeared.

No further response from here after, only a blinking cursor.

I have done the following in troubleshooting on the problem

  1. Loop back test on com1. Term console echo back the keystroke, no problem with com port run at 19200 8 N 1 I presume!

  1. A simple =93hello world=94 program was burn to ATtiny2313 to checked for error in process while burning. Led flash as it should.

It also a good time to be familiarize with ponyprog/TwinAVR at this time with erase, verify, fuses function at this time of cause not the LOCK bits and others that lock out chip from further ISP programming.

  1. The two opto isolator OK1,OK2 was swap so be sure that both TX,RX would work. Term console still show welcome massage.

Circuit board was check and re-check I could not find any error apart from a few that I found and correct before this.

I have tried to subscribe to nick's newsletter to enhance my knowledge but had no feedback from his side.

Not sure this is the correct place to post question on electronics but no much of info I could find from the web.

Your input on this problem will be much appreciated.

Regards,

LT LOO

Malaysia

Reply to
lthium
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OK we will let you off that ;) .....

Do you understand that the board is only half of the system? You need Nick's software to set it up to work. After the start message you tell the board what you want to do. I presume you are on page

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quicktest.exe will check the connection to the board and then test each of the scale connections to find out what scales are attached.

For official boards we are quite happy to fault find boards for customers.

------------------------------------------------------------------- As a side note .... We have still not heard from Nick, so are running a batch of boards ourselves and will add the royalties to the pot which is waiting for Nick to collect it. If anybody does hear from him ....

Reply to
Lester Caine

He..he .. This is part of cut and paste from e-mail to nick, missed this one out on multiple post on various site asking for help! : D

yes, even quicktst fail to communicate with DROint4. I understand that term console will do some simple test on the board. initailly I thought of buying the board as contribution to nick's work but that would leave some student out on the part that they suppose to build the board for board building points on their report. The only place I found that bare boards are still avialable is from HobbyMatrics but need some convincing jobs on student parents to fork out the money first!

Regards,

LT LOO

Reply to
lthium

I'm probably going to have to go through the same stages geting a new batch of boards, we don't have the artwork for Nick's but this has been relayed, and is just waiting for me to cross check the circuit.

The next step for you is sticking a scope on the RS232 and see if anything is going on. ONE thought - since I have had trouble with this before - is to wire up the handshake lines on the computer serial connector. I don't have the pinout to hand at present, but I've had a couple of machines where they do not send anything out unless I add them. And that relates simple to the computers RS232 port - nothing to do with YADRO. I have an LED box which goes in the cable and you can see if things are happening on teh serial cable.

Reply to
Lester Caine

Ya, Thought about the handshake line before when I do the loop back test but lazy me prefered to solder just one wire instead 4 for the full test! couple of other project I done before which involve serial port works OK with just Tx,Rx, and Sg.I thought I could get away with one this time as well!

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I do have a 15years old 40Mhz dual Channel analog scope, but could not see much with it. Much signal level at various pins on the microcontroller appear to be at high level with some ripple. even my two logic probe shown "high" status when probed. only the pin4,5 shows osc at about 1V p-p sinewave which is correct for attiny2313. The only signals that are visible is signal from the caliper/scale. if it's not that I have seen them before on nick's site I won't be able reconize them.

I will loop the three handshake pins and will report back. having to deal with six 15 years old kids is really a handfull task with all thier questions I'm like a deflated tire after each session.

Thahks for the handshake tip!

Regards,

LT LOO

Reply to
lthium

At this stage all you need to check is that the serial data FROM the computer is reaching the attiny. You know things are going the other way, and I suspect that all you are missing is the commands to get the chip to do the next step.

Reply to
Lester Caine

Hi Les,

Yes, that what found when probing on the board. The pin5 ground for OK2 was route to the wrong ground plane! I should have shoot myself for failing to find that! >:(

Now it's time to solve the problem of " All those network adaptor that refuse to go away"! Man! I hate Windoze.

As a consolation for the forty something, first time instructor that started to loose his eye sight, at least he didn't went blind and failing to find this fault. : )

Thanks for all the help and marry X'mas all.

Regards,

LT LOO

Reply to
lthium

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