In a HS robotics course we always seem to have at least one student that cannot upload from computer to mainboard no matter what we do - changing ports, cables, IDE board, IDE programmer, installing drivers etc. The board will power up but we can’t upload. Often changing the mainboard out with a spare is the only solution.
My question: is there a way to troubleshoot the board relatively quickly, perhaps using a multi meter, so that we would know if we might have a ‘dead’ board before spending too much time on it?
(Perhaps related: on an XBEE tutorial (https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/wi … -xbees/all) I found mention of a possibility of bricking either the XBEE or the mainboard if not setting the software serial switch correctly - wasn’t entirely clearwhether board or XBEE … Not having begun using bluetooth, I wonder could a student somehow do something with this switch that could damage the mainboard?
There’s not anything you can do with a multimeter to quickly check the board. The easiest thing to do would be to unplug everything from the board including an XBee if one is present and then see if a new COM port pops up on your computer when plugging into USB.
If you get a new COM port, the FTDI chip is working. Just set the IDE to that COM port, make sure the power switch is set to ‘ON’, and try to upload ‘Blink’ to the board to see if the D13 LED starts blinking. It’s a good idea to keep the XBee switch in the SW position all the time as well, you would only ever put it in the HW position if you coded for that but even if you do, you have to flip it to SW to upload new code.
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