AVR-Chat

Hello,

I am trying to help my nephew with a problem he is having with his stk500 starter kit.  When using AVR Studio he was unable to program the included 8515 chip, the connection always failed.  He was using the db-9 cable that came with the kit hooked up to the RS-232 CTRL port.

I brought the kit home with me and tried it out on my Win XP sp2 box with the same results.  I tried the "Auto Connect" as well as manually selecting different COM ports.  I then moved the stk500 over to a Linux box and used uisp to try and read the fuses off of the 8515, this time I got "programmer not found" messages. 

On both the Windows box and the Linux box I was able to confirm that I was using the correct serial port by shorting out pins 2 & 3 on the DB-9 cable and watching characters get echoed back to my term.  Local echo was off for these loopback tests.

I tried another loopback test by connecting the DB-9 cable to the RS-232 SPARE port and placing a jumper across the TX and RD pins that are located next to the target sockets.  This also failed although I'm not sure if it was because the RS-232 SPARE port is not working or if the thinking behind the test is wrong.

The stk500 has all of the jumpers set to their default configuration as outlined in the manual.  When powered on, the status LED cycles from red to green.  The included 8515 runs it's program when the switches and LEDs are hooked up with the included ribbon cables.

In short, it looks like everything is working great except for the RS-232 ports.

At this point I don't know what else to try.  I've opened a ticket on the Atmel support site and I've searched the AVRFreaks forums. 

Are there specific parameters I need to use for the serial port? Speed, parity, flow control?
Is there a way to test the RS-232 circuitry?  I have a VOM.

Thanks for your help.
Dennis Dunn




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Hi Dennis,

Did you try updating the firmware in the STK-500?

Zack

On Thu, 3 Jan 2008, Dennis Dunn wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am trying to help my nephew with a problem he is having with his stk500 starter kit.  When using AVR Studio he was unable to program the included 8515 chip, the connection always failed.  He was using the db-9 cable that came with the kit hooked up to the RS-232 CTRL port.
>
> I brought the kit home with me and tried it out on my Win XP sp2 box with the same results.  I tried the "Auto Connect" as well as manually selecting different COM ports.  I then moved the stk500 over to a Linux box and used uisp to try and read the fuses off of the 8515, this time I got "programmer not found" messages.
>
> On both the Windows box and the Linux box I was able to confirm that I was using the correct serial port by shorting out pins 2 & 3 on the DB-9 cable and watching characters get echoed back to my term.  Local echo was off for these loopback tests.
>
> I tried another loopback test by connecting the DB-9 cable to the RS-232 SPARE port and placing a jumper across the TX and RD pins that are located next to the target sockets.  This also failed although I'm not sure if it was because the RS-232 SPARE port is not working or if the thinking behind the test is wrong.
>
> The stk500 has all of the jumpers set to their default configuration as outlined in the manual.  When powered on, the status LED cycles from red to green.  The included 8515 runs it's program when the switches and LEDs are hooked up with the included ribbon cables.
>
> In short, it looks like everything is working great except for the RS-232 ports.
>
> At this point I don't know what else to try.  I've opened a ticket on the Atmel support site and I've searched the AVRFreaks forums.
>
> Are there specific parameters I need to use for the serial port? Speed, parity, flow control?
> Is there a way to test the RS-232 circuitry?  I have a VOM.
>
> Thanks for your help.
> Dennis Dunn
>

I'm not sure the "Default" is what you want, I would go through each jumper and see what it does.

Cat

Do you have the 8515 in the correct socket (A3 vs D3)?   Steve

 



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