I have built a circuit involving a gumstix, robostix, and an ATmega328 that generates the gait for my hexapod and manages an array of pressure sensors and IR sensors. However during development I have been powering it with a wall wart. Now I wish to untether it but I find that connecting my battery to the barrel connector does not power up the circuit. Can anyone explain to me how this should be done or point me to some documentation on the topic? Please note that I am using a battery just like the one I use to power my SSC-32.
I would verify the polarity of the barrel connector attached to the battery matches the polarity of the wall wart barrel connector.
Also if you wired it by hand be aware that some barrel connectors are very easy short internally if you are not vry careful when assembling them. Seems to me the gumstix module uses a 2.1mm barrel and is very small.
Thanks for the info. I have built by voltage regulation circuit with polarity protection so I felt comfortable connecting things both ways but still had no luck. Also I have not created a barrel plug for the battery yet, instead I was touching the leads that come from the barrel plug with the leads on the battery. I’m assuming that I do not need to actually plug anything into the barrel so long as I make the right connections though I could be wrong.
hmm, I don’t have the robostix just the audiostix2. It is possible there is a switch in the DC power jack but I would have thought its purpose would be to disconnect the USB connector power rail so it didn’t back feed the USB host when a DC power supply was used.
Aren’t the schematics for the different gumstix modules available somewhere? I seem to remember finding that but all they had other than eagle files were .png and .dxf files… (i.e no .pdf files to make it easy without having to d/l a bunch of other stuff).
That is a good question. There is documentation on their site and on two wikis. So far I have only found PNGs and eagle files. I have looked at them but I’m unable to determine the answer to my question. Worse yet I’m not sure which documentation to go with (e.g. the docs on the website or the docs on one of the wikis and unfortunately they’re not always consistent.
