Hello everybody,
I have just bought an Atom Bot Board and a 28 pin Atom Basic Pro but i didn’t buy the serial cable from Lynxmotion. Instead I used my normal serial cable. Then my problem is that I couldn’t be able to connect to the ABB using ATOM-Pro-IDE from MicroBasic. I have tried to connect to the board using my laptop and the Quatech USB to Serial converter and using my desktop but none of them worked.
I would like to ask if the serial cable from Lynx is a special one or not ? If it is a normal one then maybe the problem is from the ABB or the Atom Basic Pro
Ok basic troubleshooting…
Is the green LED lit up?
Is pin 1 of the Atom chip by the reset button on the Bot Board? Pin 1 on the Atom is by the half circle on the PC board.
Are you sure you are using the correct serial port or USB virtual serial port?
If the speaker enable jumper is installed, do you hear a beeping, or clicking sound?
The cable we sell is a straight through 9 pin cable. Are you sure yours is not a null modem cable?
Thanks Jim,
Im quite sure that I didn’t make any mistake in wiring the board . The green LED is OK. There is a half circle printed on the Atom chip and I put that end of the chip by the reset button of the Bot Board.
When the board is powered, there is 3 clicking sound and the board starts to beep continuously after then.
My RS-232 cable is a straight through cable.
One more thing, when I tried to connect to the board, the three LEDs A, B and C and the sound are all off ( except for the Power OK led) and then they turned on again after that. Its like the board was reset during the detection.
I have tried using both my Laptop with the USB to Serial converter and my desktop with internal COM ports but none of them worked.
Do we have to change any parameters of the COM port ? I heard that we have to change the FIFO of the COM port ??? but I couldn’t find it
The serial cable for programming AtomPro modules MUST have TX RX and DTR wired. Some serial cables will not have DTR wired.
If DTR is wired try increasing the “Reset Hold Time” in the advanced options in the AtomPro IDE. Also some USB to Serial adapters are not fast enough to get into programming mode on an AtomPro. We recommend the BAFO BF-810 adapter. They are available online approx 19 USD. If your main computer has a regular serial port I recommend you use it and increase the reset hold time a little(anywhere from 25 to 35 ms). Thats ussually the culprit if everything is wired correctly.
Thanks for your helps,
I did figure out my problem . That was because my Serial to USB converter (QUATECH SSU-100) doesn’t work well with the bot board.
But now another problem arised. I followed the instruction on this page lynxmotion.com/images/html/build065.htm
and download this file lynxmotion.com/images/files/4wd1tst1.bas
for testing.
The program ran pretty good on the bot board. I could hear 4 beeps on the startup and 1 beep each time a button was pressed. But no signals were sent to the Scorpion board because the Status led on the Scorpion board kept blinking rapidly. And the car stood still
I guess this is because the program was written for Atom chip (not Atom Pro, Im using 28pin Atom Pro), but there was no error during compiling. I havent read the programming guide yet
Thanks
Nam
I’m not familiar with the scorpion, but i know that the SSC-32 needs to be set to the proper baud rate to communicate with the BotBoard.
You may want to check your Scorpion manual and look into that.
The pulseout values are different between the Atom and the Pro. The Atom has a 1uS resolution and the Pro has a .5uS resolution. So the values need to be lowered by half to run on the Pro.
. That was because my Serial to USB converter (QUATECH SSU-100) doesn’t work well with the bot board.