In this assignment, I was to test the board that I made for Week 5: Electronics Design. I connected the board with my computer using the FTDI 6-pin USB cable. I also connected it with ISP cable to the programmer that I made in a couple weeks ago.

Because I made a mistake when I designed the circuit board, my green LED lit up as soon as I connected the FTDI cable. I did continuity testing on multiple places and it was clear that my switch was ON all the time, causing the current to flow into the LED as soon as it was connected to a power source.

I tried de-soldering my switch button and re-orient it to the right direction. However, it was not very useful because I also had some software issues. I tried running:
       sudo make -f hello.ftdi.44.echo.c.make program-usbtiny-fuses
And kept on getting the error below, which our TA and I tried to solve for multiple hours but failed.


 

Instead of echoing with the echo.c.make file, I ran some C codes in Arduino. Interestingly, it worked for first several tries with Pin 6 and then stopped working again.

I am in the middle of debugging these hardware and software problems and will upload a solution soon when when I figure it out. I was told that if the hardware is bad, people sometimes get similar errors. In the worst case, I will re-design my board and start from scratch.

We decided to run it in Guillermo's laptop. It ran just fine. I still am in the process of finding out what the problem is. The avrdude error message is very vague as it seems to be a problem not with libusb.

WEEK 8: EMBEDDED PROGRAMMING

Part1: 3D Modeling & Planning