Arduino Timeout uploading firmware

[cambo3d]

yeah, why go through all that trouble?

contact seemecnc, you might have to send it in for them to test it, if they find that they can't upload either. they'll probably send you a new board.

[Island3]

Thanks Polygonhell and Cambo, I'll email them. Oh man I do not want to take that board out, I just put it in.

[JohnStack]

Before you guess...

Outta the box impractical answer...might not fit your budget or timing. If you're not confident it is not your connection....

Are you close to a place where you can pick up an Arduino board? Borrow one? Any hackerspaces or makerspaces nearby?

You might consider purchasing a low end board ($25 or less) and seeing if you can connect.

I have an Arduino board. When I couldn't connect in the beginning, I hooked it up to get a baseline.

SeeMeCNC will ship you a new board. If you have blown it out yourself, you might have to buy it. I definitely blew mine out...

[kbob]

Are you close to a place where you can pick up an Arduino board?

If you do this, make sure you get one with the Atmega32u2 chip. Most do, but a few boards use a different USB interface chip which uses a different driver.

Over at http://arduino.cc/ they have full schematics of all the official Arduino boards, so it's easy to check.

[Island3]

Thing is, how do I know if I blew it out. I've had a wrist band on every time I handled it, so I don't think it was static. The package was opened when it arrived, so I figured the SeeME folks did something to it prior to shipping, but I'm confident they handled it well.

I get the feeling it's not blown, it's just being ornery. That I can get flickering lights on the RAMBo by sending commands from my mac suggests it's not the connection, right?

Heh heh, I knew I should've bought an assembled unit

[calabus]

I have a 2560 mega and fired it up on the same PC I have attached to the printer. I easily uploaded the firmware. Obviously a bad board. Awesome...bad motor that took me three days to get a response on and now a bad board....all of which where bad right out of the box. I find it a bit concerning that as Polygonhell said "You likely won't get an answer from SeeMeCNC here, they don't often frequent the board, send them an email or call them, they area usually pretty responsive." the developers don't bother to frequent a board on their own site to answer questions and instead rely on other customers to support their product. I am not new to open/semi-open source projects, but this is certainly the first time I have seen such a disconnect from supplier and consumer. I would expect a little more for my 1k. This makes it quite hard to suggest a Rostock to someone looking for a printer. I really don't mean to sound like an ass and appreciate all the suggestions in fixing the issue. I will contact Seeme and see if I can get a new board.

[cambo3d]

they may not be on the forum as often but they do answer emails, quickly so long as its not the weekend.

so its not a bad thing that there not on here often. As long as they answer phone calls and emails. your golden.

[foshon]

They have some of the best customer service I have ever encountered. This forum is a gift. They use it to make announcements (rarely) other than that it is completely owner moderated. They will answer your support questions quickly when submitted in the recommended fashion.

[Polygonhell]

It's an end user forum, not a support mechanism. Forums are horrible ways to do support, too hard to filter the noise out.
Call them, email them, they're extremely responsive, when I built mine there was no manual, I had a couple of questions, probably exchanged email with them 7 or 8 times in a single day when finishing things off.

[calabus]

My problem is semi-resolved. By that I mean John has responded and confirmed, from what I can gather from the email, that defective boards were shipped. It appears that prior to shipping the boards they were loaded with firmware that somehow wiped the bootloader. The boards work fine until you attempt to update new firmware....no bootloader=no firmware update. He offered to fix the issue same day if I shipped the board. I opted to take care of the issue myself. Since I play with Arduino boards often I decided to get an ISP and be done with it. I'm happy to know exactly what the problem is and know that it is something that can be fixed somewhat easily.

Given the circumstances behind this problem and the days I have put in attempting to resolve it I have to disagree with the statement 'forums don't lend themselves well to support'. What better way to tell folks that visit the 'Troubleshooting' section that defective parts were shipped. A simple announcement would dramatically cut down on builder frustration and guesswork by the buyer and in turn the forum community attempting to address a problem they couldn't possibly resolve. SeeME also has my email address. I could have at least received a mail informing me of the possible issue. This would have saved me days of troubleshooting and less time here bitching about it. No ill will, but just a lesson learned by me and hopefully the support community.

[Eaglezsoar]

My problem is semi-resolved. By that I mean John has responded and confirmed, from what I can gather from the email, that defective boards were shipped. It appears that prior to shipping the boards they were loaded with firmware that somehow wiped the bootloader. The boards work fine until you attempt to update new firmware....no bootloader=no firmware update. He offered to fix the issue same day if I shipped the board. I opted to take care of the issue myself. Since I play with Arduino boards often I decided to get an ISP and be done with it. I'm happy to know exactly what the problem is and know that it is something that can be fixed somewhat easily.

Given the circumstances behind this problem and the days I have put in attempting to resolve it I have to disagree with the statement 'forums don't lend themselves well to support'. What better way to tell folks that visit the 'Troubleshooting' section that defective parts were shipped. A simple announcement would dramatically cut down on builder frustration and guesswork by the buyer and in turn the forum community attempting to address a problem they couldn't possibly resolve. SeeME also has my email address. I could have at least received a mail informing me of the possible issue. This would have saved me days of troubleshooting and less time here bitching about it. No ill will, but just a lesson learned by me and hopefully the support community.

If I purchased a programmer like the Atmel AVRISP mkII In-System Programmer, where can I find the bootloader code needed for the Rambo?

[geneb]

I will warn you right now Eaglezsoar, you're approaching the deep end of the pool. I would _highly_ recommend that you get yourself an Arduino board to play with BEFORE you start thinking about using an ISP on the RAMBo. You'll have a nice board to learn on and you won't have to worry about accidentally bricking the RAMBo if the wheels fall off.

There are some _excellent_ tutorials over at http://www.arduino.cc and their forum is full of really nice and helpful people.

g.

[Polygonhell]

I should point out that actually flashing the bootloader is easy, the easiest/cheapest way to do it is to use a second arduino as an ISP, but there are all sorts of gotchas.
Notably if your using an extra arduino as an ISP many boards trigger the reset line on connect, if this is the case you need to bridge the reset line to GND with a largish capacitor to provide enough of a filter to remove the signal.
Then there are the fuses, if they are set correctly this shouldn't be an issue, but you need to know the board configuration to set them, and not setting them correctly can result in things like it appearing to work, but thermistor inputs won't read, or it running at 8Mhz instead of 16MHz.
A friend of mine who's pretty technical just went through this after buying a replacement chip for a Sanguino board and it probably took him 3 days to work through the issues.
It isn't just like flashing firmware.

[Eaglezsoar]

I think you both just talked me out of experimenting on a working Rambo.
I have two version one Rambo cards. If I can ever afford it, I would like to purchase the latest Rambo and use one
of the old ones to learn how to flash the bootloader. At least if I brick the old one I won't feel so bad. The programmer
I wanted to purchase has a retail cost of $35 plus shipping and I consider it cost worthy to learn how to program these
things. I also wanted to learn the ins and outs of AVR Studio. Thanks to both of you for the warnings.