Prototype v2

Published on 2019-08-05 in PewPew M4.

So the PCBs arrived again (a day earlier than expected, yay DHL), and this time with a correct footprint. So you know the drill. Disassemble the old one, move all the components to the new one. Connect to the programmer and… oh no, the dreaded “memory erase” message! But wait, after a few of those it says “connected”, so maybe it works after all? Well, only one way to find out. I flash the bootloader from itsybitsy M4 express, and it showed as a USB drive! Great. So now flash the firmware and it should work! Hmm… it doesn’t.

That’s weird. A few experiments later I determined that it works perfectly fine when connected to the JLink, but not on its own. A quick test revealed the problem: I need a pull-up resistor on the reset pin. For now a quick bodge wire solved that, but I will need another version of the PCB. Oh well. I will need to move the display connector even further towards the center of the board, because the display is still sicking out a bit.

I will also experiment a bit with the capacitors, to see if I can have fewer of them and still have the device work reliably.