Testing

I took an internet cable and the one end I connected to the Controller board. The other end I put in a similar connector where I connected the plus 13.8 volt.

Pin 1 and 2 of that connector are in en out data. 3, 4 and 7 are +Vcc, 5,6 and 8 are GND.

After putting power on the board, I checked all the plus 12V and plus 5V points on the board. I already checked the working of the freq counter input part, so I wanted to test the clock. On the several pins around the micro controller I could see no signals of a clock. I looked at the documentation of the micro controller and I saw that the internal circuitry can disable it to save power, so I didn't panicked yet,......

I saw in the source of the firmware that one of the first actions in the program was reading the EEPROM. So I put a scope on the pin 22 and 23. No signal,.....

I pulled the reset input (9) low and then I saw that the controller was working. It gave a lot of pulses, on the clock and the data pins.

After that any activities on pins were done. I didn't get any output on the drivers yet (there is also no reason for it by the way).

So, proof of the running of the program, burning went ok,...??

The next thing to do is making the communication PCB ready, so I can talk to the controller board via the PC.

In the meantime I carefully read the documentation of the ATMEGA32. I read that I had to set some fusebits in order to get the external crystal oscillator working. So the question was with what I had to set the fuse bits.

I read the values in the source code of the firmware, fusebits low --> 9E hex, fusebits high D1.

Again I connected the ATMEGA32 chip to my USBasp programmer and set the bits with eXtreme burner. After setting the fusebits, the USBasp device braked down. No action any more. But anyway my fusebits low and high were programmed.

So, now again I checked the crystal oscillator, and it was running exactly on the frequency printed on the crystal housing.

Later on, I figured out that my USBASP programmer was not broken, but it was not be able to power up the ATMEGA anymore because I had set the 'LOCKED-bit'. With a new ATMEGA32, the programmer was working 100% OK.

 

 

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