DA16200 flakey and unreliable - possible DOA

I have the DA16200 R3 Shield and have been struggling with the AT commands. Yesterday the serial port would sometimes respond, even as far as obtaining a wifi connection. However, most of the time the chip fails to respond to commands and fails to return an init message on start up. As of today, I’ve only gotten an occasional init done message with no other activity and the chip fails to respond to commands of any sort. Even when I did get commands through, the chip was flakey and unreliable. It only sometimes worked, seemingly at random.

My initial attempts were with minicom and an FT232 board. Now I have tried plugging into an Arduino Uno and running the demo sketch - no response, no init message, nothing. Chip appears lifeless. I’m not seeing much current drawn on the 3.3v rail either - it looks like the chip just doesn’t wake up reliably. Nothing happens when I press reset, nor when I attempt the factory reset on A7.

While I am understanding of the considerations involved with selling raw circuit boards to end users, in my experience (as a professional EE and long time SF customer) this is an exceptional circumstance. I have never had a board act this poorly on day 1 before from either SF or its fruity competitor.

It sounds like a dead board; head over to www.sparkfun.com/returns/ (or similar if purchased form a 3rd party vendor) and we’ll get ya squared away

Hi Jeremy,

I have a sparkfun DA16200 thing board and I am struggling to find out a way to send AT commands to it to connect to an AWS thing.

I understand from the manual that when we plug this board to USB, 2 virtual COM ports will be shown in device manager. ANd then we connect via teraterm (for windows) to both the ports, one for console commands and the other for AT.

Could you please confirm if you were using windows and teraterm?

Regards,

Raji