Riley

Well the short answer is “are you crazy?!” 🙂  The chips are pretty hard to remove let alone solder.  The thermal pad (look at the holes on the bottom of the board) are very very hard to remove.  If you do this mod, you are pretty much on your own support wise.  YES, the chips are pin compatibles.  I do recognize that its easy for me to say “buy a v7” but really unless you really have literally expert soldering skills I would avoid this venture.

Hope that helps / discourages / encourages  you.

Riley

Sfeine,

That sounds very odd.  Lets go ahead and get that replaced.  Send us an email with the subject RMA in it to

synthetos [at} gmail.com and we can get you going!

Riley

Yah that is weird. I think we have tracked it down to sending data when the board is in bootloader mode.  When the light is flashing at boot.. wait until it stops before connecting / sending data.  We are tracking on this.  However this should help avoid this issue in the future for now.

ril3y

twforeman,

Once grbl is on the Arduino, the arduino bootloader is not longer on the board.  YOu will need an avr programmer to upgrade grbl.  We use avr studio 4  or 6 to upgrade grbl on the seeeduinos.  Avrdude works, but studio is faster.

Oh and we use the AVR-ISP MKII as our avr programmer.

We have instructions on how to flash grbl here:
https://github.com/synthetos/grblShield/wiki/Getting-grbl.  There are other ways to do this.  However this is the only way we support.

Riley

I asked you to tell me if you got the prompt on the arduino on Feb 10th.  You never responded to my question.  We have a lot to deal with, we cannot help you if you do not give us the tools we need to troubleshoot.

I tested the arduino this evening by itself with out shield connected.

The normal sound and detection that happens in windows when the usb cable is plugged into it is absent, the surface mount power led is very dim.

Does not tell me if your arduino was able to see the grblShield prompt in your terminal.  Also if you would like to send your grblShield back that is fine.  We do charge a re-work fee if the polarity was reversed.  Its fairly easy to tell if this happened.

Upon answering of my initial question.  What would you like to do?

Riley

thanks for jumping in on this one nick!

Riley

freemore,

OK, so my bad.  There is much to be desired when it comes to tgFX and instructions.  I did write up a HOWTO in the developer section of the tgFX wiki for OSX.

https://github.com/synthetos/tgFX/wiki/Developer-Notes

This should get you EXACTLY what you need but are stumbling in the dark with no documentation! 🙂

The beanpathadapter was something I was testing.. didnt work.. left in.. and did not commit the lib.  Either way pull this morning’s update.  I am running 357.01 firmware.  I am going to update here in a few to edge branch.  I don’t think anything major will be broken but I am just putting my “dev setup” out there.

Today, Alden came over and we installed netbeans, tgfx, ftdi drivers all from scratch on his new mac. So I know the instructions should be good to go!

If there is ANYTHING that is not clear on the wiki lets fix it!  There are BUGS in this code.  If you want to help out I can add you to tgFX project too!  Please test it out and open “issues” on the tgFX github page.

ril3y

Well,  I dont like the opensource gcode creators.  That being said there is pyCam and phlatscript.  If you are serious about milling I would pickup cambam. Its not super expensive but its nice.  There is a free trial too.

ril3y