MAX30101 & MAX32664 - what am I doing wrong?

cerocca · July 29, 2021, 5:33pm

Hi everybody,

sorry for this other post but I am struggling to understand what I am doing wrong with my MAX30101 & MAX32664 breakout(s).

I purchased 3 of them: on 1 I soldered pins, while the other 2 were left unsoldered (for the purposes of my project I cannot use pins)

The first tests on the board with pins were a total failure: as I also wrote in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=143&t=54624 I was only getting error 254, always. I tried some solutions - like suggested in other threads on this forum - but 0 success.

So I ordered some IC hooks for using the other 2 boards (the unsoldered ones), exactly as in Sparkfun’s hookup guide. Also here I noticed strange behaviors:

1st board worked once, and not on the first try. After that, it started behaving like the soldered board: always error 254
2nd board seems to work, question is … for how long ?

I am wondering why the board with pins soldered and the 1st with IC hooks are not working: in every configuration (so for all 3 boards) I checked continuity with a multimeter, and I2C scan always finds the IC on the I2C bus.

What am I missing?

Is it possible that I “fried” the first 2 boards? Surely I don’t work in a lab environment, but I use a lot of Arduinos and breakout boards / components and I never had a dead component. So 2 out of 3 seems me a too strange statistic.

Any idea or suggestion about all this? Thanks to who will be able to help!

TS-Chris · July 29, 2021, 10:30pm

Error 254 means “Unknown error”, it’s a catch all for any weird things that might happen.

While not likely, it’s possible you fried a board. Can you provide photos showing the top and bottom of the board and how you have it connected too your Arduino?

cerocca · July 30, 2021, 4:10pm

Hi @TS-Chris,

and thanks for your reply. About the photos you requested (sorry for quality, if needed I can upload other ones), here below one showing how I have connected to my “arduino”. In th next posts images of the boards, both top and bottom.

Qwiic connector is for I2C (as written before, any board is always found by the I2C scanner sketch), /RST and MFIO are on D2 and on D3 pins. Sketch is the default, example one.

Please also note that:

the “arduino” is a samd21 board from adafruit, but I tried this connection also to a Arduino Uno and result is 100% the same
the 3rd board is working with this config, while 1st and 2nd board not. 2nd board worked only 1 afternoon, then (apparently) dead.