Cyton dongle problem: no blue light... [resolved]
Hi, I am new to OpenBCI biosensing devices.
I give the devices a try, but I encountered a problem.
I cannot connect the Cyton dongle to the Cyton board. I use OpenBCI_GUI v5.1.0
The first time I plugged the dongle, there is no blue light. But I can see serial/COM port of the device in my OpenBCI_GUI and in Windows Device Manager. So, I guess the FTDI driver works fine.
But I got the "Error reading from serial port" message when clicking the AUTO-SCAN button in the RADIO CONFIGURATION.
And when I click the AUTO_CONNECT button in the SERIAL CONNECT section, I got this error "Unable to connect to Cyton. Please check hardware and power source." During the AUTO_CONNECT process (before raising the error message), there is blinking yellow light on the dongle.
I use fresh batteries for the Cyton board, so I guess there is enough power, indicated by the blinking blue light on the board.
This problem is different than what was discussed in this forum
https://openbci.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/2798/found-a-cyton-dongle-but-could-not-connect-to-the-board-resolved
since the problem persist when I tried the dongle using 3 different operating systems: PC with Windows 10, PC with Debian Linux, and laptop with Windows 11.
And I also didn't experience "Serial Port in use. Try another port or unplug/plug dongle" problem.
Is it a radio connection problem?
And how to solve it?
Please help, thanks.
Comments
Hi, I'm facing the same issue. Has this problem been solved?
Many thanks.
Please post a picture of the Cyton board.
Richard @retiutut, the person posting above on April 21 is 'Cindy' in Taiwan, who claimed to have bricked their board after removing the mainboard RFduino and attempting some type of 'wired usb' interface. There is a Zendesk trail [Ticket 35359] for that email interaction. They also posted these two recent threads:
https://openbci.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/4004/cyton-board-unresponsive-after-baud-rate-set-to-921600
https://openbci.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/4007/quick-question-about-using-serial0-for-wired-communication-on-cyton
I have replied to both those threads. I am hoping they are able to restore the Cyton to its original hardware and firmware condition and resume normal operation.
For my case, it turns out to be a hardware problem, so I send it back and they gave me the new one. Everything is fine now.
Thanks to the OpenBCI team.
Awesome! Glad to hear it!
I have a V3-8 board that I purchased in 2015. I only used it a few times back then and recently started using it again. Previously I was running it on Ubuntu, but now I’m on Windows 11.
The board has been behaving erratically. At first, it wouldn’t work at all. I left it connected and, surprisingly, after about a week the blue LED came on. I thought the issue was resolved and that it was just a matter of procedure, but the next day it stopped working again. I left it connected once more, and the following day it powered up normally.
Based on a recommendation I read here in the forum, I measured the voltage between GND and DVDD. The reading was 0.56 V
Hi @Juanco,
Can you clarify, you said above, "...and the following day it powered up normally."
Do you mean the board is now working ok with OpenBCI_GUI? I believe support for the '8-bit' microcontroller boards ended some time ago:
https://docs.openbci.com/Deprecated/8bitBoardDep/
So one thing this means is that later version of the Cyton firmware, only ran on the 32-bit PIC32 boards, firmware version mentioned on this page:
https://docs.openbci.com/Cyton/CytonSDK/#firmware-v200-new-commands
But if your 8-bit boards is still working, it should support all the V1 firmware features. Listed on the page above.
re: DVDD, the Cyton main voltage regulator takes the battery voltage down to 3.3 volts. If you are not seeing that, check your battery and cable. There is another set of plus and minus regulators for the ADS1299 chip.
Regards, William
Thank you very much for the information. I ran some power-up tests and it connected. There were some readings on channel 3, but afterwards it stopped working. I’ll review the pages you mentioned.
If the GUI connected and you had data on channel 3, that means almost everything is working. Be sure to check your battery, use fresh cells if you have the AA holder. You can also obtain lithium cells and charger that will fit the Cyton connector. Such as these at Adafruit.
https://www.adafruit.com/category/574
https://www.adafruit.com/category/575