At the start of the day, I had my TinyG connected to my Mac and I had no trouble interacting with it through CoolTerm. I disconnected the TinyG from the Mac and connected it to a Raspberry Pi to work on controlling it programmatically from the Pi. I was having trouble getting my program to work. I wanted to check the state of the TinyG so I connected it back to the Mac. Now the TinyG is not responding to the Mac.
When I tell CoolTerm to connect, CoolTerm thinks it is connected but there is no output from the TinyG. Not even a prompt. I have tried hitting the reset button on the TinyG.
The blue power light is on. Whenever I have CoolTerm send a command, the red tx light on the TinyG flashes.
Does anyone have any thoughts on what I should try next?
I am not sure why your tinyg is dropping its main firmware. (hence stuck in bootloader mode) but you are not alone. I suspect faulty bootloader load. Which means if I am right then you will see this again possibly. We saw this in the past but fixed it. Not sure how its coming up again unless I SCREWED it up and loaded the wrong bootloader. I will look into this. Sorry about all of this.
I can get you a new tinyg and you can send yours back if you would like. Or if you have an avrprogrammer I can help you reload the bootloader on it.
I do not have a power switch. I power off the tinyg by unplugging from the wall. The firmware is 0.95.
I'm working on finding up-to-date avrdude. I'm on a Mac and when I download the Arduino software as recommended in the instructions, all I get is Arduino.app.
Obviously point it to the hex file you downloaded.
then you should see something like this..
Connecting to programmer: .
Found programmer: Id = "XBoot++"; type = S
Software Version = 1.7; No Hardware Version given.
Programmer supports auto addr increment.
Programmer supports buffered memory access with buffersize=512 bytes.
Programmer supports the following devices:
Device code: 0x7b
avrdude: AVR device initialized and ready to accept instructions
avrdude: Device signature = 0x1e9744
avrdude: NOTE: FLASH memory has been specified, an erase cycle will be performed
To disable this feature, specify the -D option.
avrdude: erasing chip
avrdude: reading input file "/Users/rileyporter/Development/TinyG/firmware/tinyg/default/tinyg.hex"
avrdude: input file /Users/rileyporter/Development/TinyG/firmware/tinyg/default/tinyg.hex auto detected as Intel Hex
avrdude: writing flash (100942 bytes):
That worked. I re-flashed the system and it is now working.
So, now back to your original response. Do you expect the problem to recur? I do not have an avrprogrammer. Does that mean I should swap for a new board?
Now that it is running is there anything I can provide to you that would help diagnose what caused the problem?
You and Tobin had the very same issue. Both had the same fix. I am not sure if this will continue. However, Its looking more now like it might have been a bad flash file? I am not 100% sure. If it happens again we very much want to know about it. For now we ask that you run it a bit more and see if anything changes. If you could record exactly what you were doing when it broke that would be great.
We have not problem replacing your board, however lets see if it happens again first.
I looked at Tobin's thread. Just so you know while trying to determine the cause, my TinyG is several weeks old, not new like his. It had no problems before a couple of days ago, Also, I've never used tgFX. He mentions turning a pot. I adjusted the motor 1 pot when I first got the board, had no problems, and haven't touched it since.
I will let you know if a problem develops again.
This topic is from the original forum (June 2013). Your reply starts a new discussion linked to it.