Some of you may remember way back when I had tons of problems with programming my picaxe. Well, they're back with a vengeance.
I recently got a breadboard and decided to try programming my Picaxe-08M with it. I followed this image:
(http://www.thebackshed.com/windmill/articles/images/PicAxeCircuit.gif) and looted the headphone jack from my old non-working board. The 5V I have is a new 9v battery with a 5v regulator (I know, not very much current, but enough to program, right?). My voltmeter says it's definitely a constant 5v. Requisite blurry photo with MS Paint labels included below.
When I try to program it with a serial cable, I get "Hardware Not Found'. Am I making a dumb mistake or is the technological universe conspiring against me?
In addition to rik, using a 9v battery will work fine(with a 5v reg of course). 9v’s are not great for powering motors, I wouldn’t worry about powering a proc though. As a test, I powered several picaxes and arduino along with running sensors and a bluetooth serial device off of one 9v battery with no problems…I left it running for a bit if I recall.
I am currently writing a picaxe book and the first installemnt of it is available on my website. It has all the basic a information in there and a lot a great general inforamtion that you guys should see. Please check it out. You can find it in the prop how to section. Comments welcome.I in the process of building a few robots with my son which I hope to show you soon.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure they’re right. When I get a chance though, I guess I’ll switch them around a few times to make sure I didn’t screw up. From what I’m seeing, a, b, and c in that image correspond to 1, 2, and 3 in the image I posted.
I still haven’t fiugred it out, but I was able to take a picture with a digital camera. I would be forever indebted to you if you could figure out what I’m doing wrong. The wires to the thing that connects to the cable are taken out, but they are there and definitely have a signal.
Did you plug your headphone jack directly in to the breadboard or did you use jumper wires to mount the jack externally? If it is plugged into the breadboard, that is your problem. The legs are not long enough to plug into a breadboard.
Did you move resistors around in between taking initial and latest photo? The reason I’m asking is because in latest photo, your resistors are not connected as they plugged into separate raws.
Yeah, I tried that. Also, yeah, that resistor was in the wrong place, but presumably that happened when i got frustrated, took everything off, and started over. It still doesn’t work after fixing it.
Ah well, thanks. What are the chances solarbotics sent me a pic instead of a picaxe?
What kinds of diagnostics have you checked BEFORE connecting to the picaxe? are you able to short the collar/ring of the audio, and check that the serin gets returned to you via serout?
I’d recommend against just switching all the jumpers around in an effort to find the correct config - you might end up grounding something that you shouldn’t. I did this once, and I’m now in world of pain trying to connect a new sparkfun programmer board.
Which brings me to another suggestion - you could save yourself a bit of frustration by purchasing a programmer board (in theory anyhow), it helps to cut down on the number of likely things that have been wired up incorrectly…
I’m not exactly sure what you mean for the first thing, sorry.
Also, I didn’t mean I was just moving things around; I took everything off the board and put it back again based on that schematic to try to rule out bad luck/dumb mistakes. It didn’t work, but I ended up making a new dumb mistake.
Yeah, and the reason this whole thing started was because I had a picaxe-14 board that completely didn’t work, so I tried doing it on a breadboard so I could see everything.
The audio pin has three regions on it: the tip, ring and collar - going from tip downwards.
by shorting the ring and the collar, I mean put them electrically in contact with each other, perhaps by twisting a small piece of bare wire, or even just an aligator clip on the audio plug. The catch here is that you MUST be careful NOT to short the tip too - otherwise you might wreck something… so be careful.
Once you’ve shorted these two, then you can open your picaxe programmer software and transmit (I’m not sure what you might use for a pc, but for a mac, using macaxepad -> PICAXE (menu) -> terminal then simpy type anything into the “send” boxIf your cable is correctly recognised by your computer, then whatever you send down the cable will simply loop back via the short, and be printed back in the receive box.
If your computer doesn’t properly recognise your cable (e.g. incorrectly connected, bad drivers, or something more sinister), then this test won’t work (and you won’t be able to program your picaxe either…).
I hope that helps…(and I hope I have it right too…)
