pro mini + wifly

Development Boards Arduino
1

I am starting with the simple question:

Is there anything besides the connections to VCC, GND, RST, 7, 10, 11, 12, and 13 that I need to do in order to follow the WiFly-shield hookup guide? I just had a pro-mini lying around, and figured it would work instead of buying a large-footprint board…

Anyway, the sketch compiles fine. The WiFly is even getting power (PIO6 blinks amber, PIO4 blinks green). But the sketch never manages to complete the call to “SpiSerial.begin()”… it just hangs.

Any ideas?

2

How do you know it hangs? Do you have an oscilloscope?

3

It posted the following to the serial terminal:

SPI UART on WiFly Shield terminal tool

This is a tool to help you troubleshoot problems with the WiFly shield.

For consistent results unplug & replug power to your Arduino and WiFly shield.

(Ensure the serial monitor is not open when you remove power.)

Attempting to connect to SPI UART…

And it never gets to:

Connected to SPI UART

Like it says in the guide…

Is it “hanging”? I cant say for sure… more like it just is unresponsive… which is why I asked if I have even started correctly

4

Well… I have no idea if I just bricked it, but here is what I found out…

If I applied the solder-jumper to PIO9, I was able to force the adhoc mode.

I was then able to use my Mac to connect directly to the WiFly via telnet (telnet 169.254.1.1 2000)

I then tried to manage an update to 4.41 from 2.38:

$$
factory R
save
reboot

$$
set wlan join 1
set wlan ssid <ssid>
set wlan phrase <password>
set ip dhcp 1
set ftp address 198.175.253.161
set ftp dir public
set ftp user roving
set ftp pass Pass123

save
reboot

At this point, I needed to:

  • - desolder the PIO9 jumper
  • - go to my router, find the address that DHCP gave out to the WiFly
  • - telnet to that address again (telnet 192.168.1.166 2000)

    • Thinking I was almost there, I ran the following (as advised by the Microchip website, when upgrading from a <4.xx image):

    $$
ftp update wifly3-441.img
factory R
reboot

    Anyway, that was apparently a bad idea, because now it blinks the LED that means it cant get an address, and if I resolder PIO9, I end up no longer seeing the AdHoc network either.

    Hope I didnt brick it…