Dear Mr. Murphy, you must have had a ball these past few days…
I goofed. Again. Big time. Well, not Toyota- or BP-scale big time, but still. It’s all your fault, Mr. Murphy!
About two dozen faulty ATmega’s were shipped as part of the JeeNode Kits. And another five dozen or so were packed into kits-in-stock:
What happened? Well, that “flashy” new multi-ISP programmer I was so proud of has a bug when the “isp_cpature.pde” sketch is used in replay mode: it doesn’t program the fuse bits properly. Whoopsy daisy. I thought I had all the scenarios covered and tested, but clearly I didn’t. Those ATmega’s are shipped running at 1 MHz, and the pre-loaded RF12demo is initializing the serial port to a totally useless 57600 / 16 = 3600 baud.
This morning (i.e. yesterday by the time this post comes out), I went through the stock of ATmegas, including those in already-packaged-and-labeled JeeNode kits, and redid the fuses and uploads. Not quite my idea of fun.
Anyway. The good news is that everyone has been contacted, and that I’ve sent out replacement ATmega’s to those people who I’m quite certain have the botched version. A few people will have run into the problem (that’s how I found out!), but most kits are probably still in transit, and will now be followed by the fixed ATmega(s) shortly.
In case I missed anyone, here are the symptoms: the LED on the USB-BUB stays on relatively long when a JeeNode kit is plugged in, there is no greeting from the pre-loaded RF12demo or there are only garbled characters, and you can’t upload to the JeeNode. The problem is only with ATmegas sent out in the past few days, no more than perhaps a week ago. JeeNode USBs and JeeLinks are not affected. If you run into exactly this problem, please email me and I’ll send you a replacement ATmega.
To make matters worse, I also mixed up some of the early Carrier Board and Ether Card orders, fogetting to include this or that. All issues reported to me have now been resolved.
Oh well, live and learn.
Now go home, Mr. Murphy, and don’t come back. Please? :)
I believe Mr Murphy is Irish, so he should be able to get a Ryan Air flight pretty cheap. Mr Sod (of the law fame) however, sounds decidedly English :)
As i know Atmegas always has cpu clock divider fuse enabled by default ;)
I had a similar problem with a JNode ordered by late december 2009. At first I thought I had made a mistake in the assembly, but when I replaced the ATMega368 it worked. I reflashed it with a full-blown programmer, and it was then working fine too… Murphy strikes twice?
Sorry to hear that, but glad you were able to fix it. The old setup was a bit error-prone, so I may have made mistakes with preparing the ATmega’s once in a while. With the new setup, I hope that will become a thing of the past.