32bit Chipkit board won't connect to dongle.

nickjnickj california
in Cyton
I'm at the part of the getting started document where it says to switch on the board and the light will blink 3 times.  The light is just turning on with no blinking and then I can't find the board in the GUI.  I did everything without trouble until this point in the tutorial and tried restarting everything a few times.  The batteries are fresh.  

I have windows 8.1 and used the setup executable on here for the windows FTDI drivers. 


Thanks for the help.  I'm stuck.

Comments

  • nickjnickj california
    sorry for posting for a seemingly basic question but the document said to go to this section of the forum and i couldn't find anything about this specific problem when searching.
  • wjcroftwjcroft Mount Shasta, CA
    Nick, hi.

    The 32 bit board only blinks once. The three blink happens on the 8 bit board. Do you see any COM ports showing up in your Device Manager after plugging in the dongle? Does the blue light on the dongle come on after plugging it in? Have you tried on another laptop?


    William

  • biomurphbiomurph Brooklyn, NY
    @nickj, sorry for the confusion.
    The 8 bit board blue LED blinks on startup, the 32bit board blue LED remains steady on
  • nickjnickj california
    Hey sorry for the late response but yeah I figured it out with your help.  Thank you!  Now to figure out a way to get this earlobe electrode to stay on!
  • gigTank1gigTank1 Chattanooga
    Hi nickj, 

    It sounds like we are having the same issue, so can I ask how you solved it?
  • nickjnickj california
    I ended up finding the board under com 3 in the GUI.  I think it wasn't showing up before but then I found it.  If that doesn't work try to describe exactly where you're stuck.
  • gigTank1gigTank1 Chattanooga
    Thanks Nick,

    I got it to work.

  • nickjnickj california
    Nice!
  • hanshans Berlin, Germany
    edited July 2015 
    Hi All,
    I am unable to establish a connection between the dongle and the 32 bit OpenBCI board.

    My setup is as follows:
    The switch on the dongle is set to "GPIO 6". When I plug it into the USB 
    port the red TX led flashes once and the blue led lights up and stays lit.

    The board is powered by a set of fresh batteries. With the switch in the 
    PC position the blue led lights up and stays lit. For the 32-bit board 
    this is the expected behaviour, as I understand it.

    I have tested the following procedure under both Linux and Windows with 
    FTDI drivers installed.

    When I start the OpenBCI GUI via Processing  and try to connect to the 
    OpenBCI board I get the following result:

    The yellow RX led flashes once, then some time passes, it flashes 
    another time and the OpenBCI GUI shows the message that a timeout has 
    occured and to try again, Power off and on etc.

    Using a 2.4 GHz band scanner I can see the OpenBCI board transmitting 
    but I cannot see any transmission from the dongle. I have also used 
    minicom and Termite to connect to the dongle. I can send characters which results in 
    the yellow RX led lighting up, but does not result in any visible RF 
    transmission to the board.


    Is there any way I can debug this? Can anyone give a sample connection log using a serial connection to the dongle?

    Best regards, hans
  • biomurphbiomurph Brooklyn, NY
    Were you ever able to communicate between the Board and the Dongle in the past?
    If not, this sounds like the Dongle radio and the Board radio may be on different channels.
    It is not something that is likely to happen, but we did stock our inventory with OpenBCI systems with 5 different channel settings.

    You can reset the channels by uploading to the Dongle and Board radios. Here is a tutorial on how to do that.

  • wjcroftwjcroft Mount Shasta, CA
    @hans , when you plug the dongle into Windows, do you see a new COM port showing up in your device manager? On Linux a new /dev will appear. The device ports should disappear when dongle is removed.

    Two previous users on this thread managed to resolve the issue with a bit of experimentation.

  • wjcroftwjcroft Mount Shasta, CA
    @hans , ok sorry, just rereading your post I see that you are getting some activity with the COM port in terms of RX led. Have you tried another laptop altogether? (I assume you were booting Windows and Linux on the same machine.)

  • hanshans Berlin, Germany
    @biomurph , thanks for the quick answer. The communication between dongle and board always timed out. The dongle bag indicates "openBCI 32bit channel 4" and the board bag "16chan channel 4".
    But I wonder that the red Tx LED doesn't flash when the dongle tries to connect. (so it doesn't send)
    Only the yellow Rx LED flashes two times.

    @wjcroft, I saw the new COM port showing up in the device manager, it was COM6 resp. COM10 resp. a dev.  I selected it and started. (When I removed the dongle it disappeared). I tried it on a PC IBM9229 and on a Thinkpad W520 with Windows XP resp. Win7 and fedora22 on different USB ports that work fine with USB sticks etc.
  • hanshans Berlin, Germany
    @biomurph + @wjcroft: relief!   I just programmed the dongle RFduino with the host.ino with channel 4 and  now communication works with all 16 channels! Now we see Rx (green) and Tx (red) LEDs busily blinking and all works fine. It seems that the dongle wasn't programmed for channel 4 as stated on the bag.
  • biomurphbiomurph Brooklyn, NY
    Glad you got it working hans!
    Sincere apologies for the radio channel mixup! We pride ourselves on QC, and that was a mistake on our part.
Sign In or Register to comment.

© Vanilla Keystone Theme 2026