Messages posted by: TheGipp

Just received my pair of miniWireless boards.
I immediately tried to usr avrdude with my favorite Bus Pirate to peek at the miniWireless fuses, etc.

This ends in eventual success. But, at first it was not working.

(1) Here's how I wired up the Bus Pirate to the miniWireless:
BusPirate <-> miniWireless
miso <- miso (D12)
CS -> RST
mosi -> mosi (D11)
SCK -> SCK (D13)
5V -> VIN (make sure 5V is NOT wired to VCC on the FTDI end of the board)

OR you can wire the 3.3V on the BusPirate to VCC on the miniWireless board

I've been using this setup for a long time on my Arduino Uno working great.

(2) to use avrdude to do a simple peek at the board I do the following (your port will probably be something other than /dev/buspirate)
avrdude -p atmega328p -c buspirate -P /dev/buspirate

Typically, this reports the fuse settings and exits. But, my first attempt(s) on the miniWireless kept resulting in:

Attempting to initiate BusPirate binary mode...
avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-2
Double check connections and try again, or use -F to override
this check.

avrdude done. Thank you.

So, hooked it up to the scope and it looked like there was voltages halfway between 0 and 3.3V in some spots on the MISO pin. hmmmm. something's not right. I'm sure this approach should be possible. So, looking at the schematic, there are two other potential competitors for the SPI "bus" already on my miniWireless - the radio and the external memory. It turns out that the radio or memory might be floating on its SEL pin and it's replying to my SPI signals from the BusPirate. I put a 10k pullup on D5 (which is the memory CS) and a 10k pullup on D10 (which is the radio CS). Then everything started working!

My successful avrdude response:

Attempting to initiate BusPirate binary mode...
avrdude: AVR device initialized and ready to accept instructions

Reading | ################################################## | 100% 0.01s

avrdude: Device signature = 0x1e950f

avrdude: safemode: Fuses OK (E:05, H

A, L:FF)

avrdude done. Thank you.

Subsequently, I removed the pullup from the memory and kept the pullup on D10 and it kept working. Maybe the memory has its own pullup?
Hopefully, this will help someone else use avrdude and the Bus Pirate to program their miniWireless.

Edit: The memory data sheet says the host is responsible for holding CS high. So, both of the pullups are recommended.

TheGipp