General availability of PICnDuino

[mjholtkamp]

Hi Brad,

Someone recently pointed me to your PICnDuino project and I was immediately excited because I was looking for something like this. Unfortunately, I found out that the kickstart project was finished. Even though I was happy that it got funded, I found out I was too late to order one.

You know what I'm going to ask next I think: When can I get my hands on one? If this is going to take a while, I'll be happy to buy one off of you, in case you have a spare (not likely, but if one never asks...).

Regards,
Michiel

[brad]

Hi Michiel, I do actually have some left over (a limited amount) how many did you want to get?

[mjholtkamp]

That is great news! I would like to get two if that's possible at all. I assume they are priced similar to the kickstarter project? If so, we can swap personal details in PM.

Thanks for the quick response!

[brad]

Sure thing, could you send me through a PM with the details (just so I have a record in my inbox) and we'll get things organised.

[mjholtkamp]

No problem, I will send you a PM

[mjholtkamp]

Just wanted to let you know I received both PICnDuino's and at least the arduino sides are working (haven't tried the PIC side yet). The LED connected to PIN 13 of one of the PICnDuino's isn't working, but that's not a big problem as I'm not going to use it and there is another one on PIN 9 that works well. The other PICnDuino works correctly as far as I can see.

Anyway, thanks for sending them!

[brad]

Great to hear that they arrived. Although I'm sorry to hear that one of your LED's is not working - Does it work if you connect an external LED to it?

[mjholtkamp]

Great to hear that they arrived. Although I'm sorry to hear that one of your LED's is not working - Does it work if you connect an external LED to it?

I don't have an external LED handy, but I measured the voltage between GND and PIN13, and GND and PIN9 when running the blink program (2 seconds on, 2 seconds off, both LEDs at the same time). For the problematic PICnDuino, the voltage goes up (almost 5V) on PIN9 when LED1 is on and drops to zero when LED1 is off. PIN13 does not change voltage.

When I run the same program on the correctly working PICnDuino, both LEDs blink simultaneously and the voltage goes up on both PINs when the LEDs are on (as expected).

As I said, it's not a big problem for me, but if you want to debug further, please tell me what you want to check next.

[brad]

Interesting regarding the PIN 13 voltage - what voltage does it stay on?

[mjholtkamp]

Sorry, I should have mentioned that. The voltage stays at zero.

[brad]

It could be as simple as an open circuit between the microcontroller output pin and the LED / resistor. Can you try checking the voltage at the microcontroller pin?

[mjholtkamp]

It could be as simple as an open circuit between the microcontroller output pin and the LED / resistor. Can you try checking the voltage at the microcontroller pin?

Huh, that is weird... now it works. I was measuring all kinds of things, from the microcontroller to the pin 13 point (sorry, don't know the proper term, but it's where you can solder a connection), from pin 13 to the resistor, measured the resistor itself (I'm guessing it was about 1020 Ohm), tested the LED (as a diode), then from the LED to GND and even to 5V (to check if there was a connection). I checked this with the other (correctly working) PICnDuino and did not see any big differences in the measurements. However, while I didn't change the code or didn't do any soldering, but all of a sudden the LED started working!

So now I have two PICnDuino's, both of which are working as expected (at least the ATmel part, I haven't tested the PIC part yet).

I'm baffled. I'm sure I'm not crazy, but that's what all crazy people say of course Maybe there was a loose connection somewhere that I 'fixed' by touching it with the leads of the multimeter?

Anyway, it's working now, so I'm happy

[brad]

That is strange - but good news! It may have just been a very strange open circuit. Perhaps if it shows itself again then you could reflow those solder joints around the LED / resistor to hopefully make it all good permanently.

[mjholtkamp]

Yeah, I'm thinking maybe temperature changes during transport. I'll resolder when the problem pops up again.

Thanks!

[brad]

No worries