Sometimes, when messing with stuff, you end up in a blind alley which makes no sense…

This happened to me a few days ago, as I was trying to get a good setup going for programming the new JeeNode Micro v3.

The code in the IDE was working, I was able to program the JNµ via avrdude on the command line, but for some crazy reason, the same thing just kept failing when launched through the new 1.5.2 Arduino IDE. Getting that to work would make all the difference in the world, since it means you don’t need to install anything other than the IDE (on any platform) and then simply drop in the ide-hardware folder.

Very odd: a Flash Board which works on one Mac with avrdude, but fails with the IDE, which also uses avrdude. Time to set up the scope in Logic Analyser mode! Lots of wires, lots of configuration to identity all the signals, and then the fun starts: locating the spot in the data stream which would allow me to see what was going on.

Here is a peek at the SPI bus, decoded where it is reporting the ATtiny84 signature bytes:

Looks ok. Next, instead of looking at the SPI bus, I looked at the 9600 baud serial data:

It’s a slower time scale, since the bit stream is not as fast, thus allowing to capture more information (2 M samples are not that much when sampling at fixed time intervals, since you have to sample often enough to reliably decode the data stream).

I even suspected the power supply lines, and had a look at VCC as an analog trace:

And although it’s not very clean, this wasn’t the problem either. Drat…

Since the verification was failing, I decided to capture the data read-back in the second half of the programming process. The way to do this, is to set the trigger on the RESET line going low at the start, and then delaying the capture by about 4 seconds. As you can see in that last screenshot, this is the point where avrdude switches from writing data into flash memory to reading the data back.

And sure enough, the data read back was wrong. Not much, but just some bits flipped – consistently, and reproducably!

It wasn’t a hardware problem after all! A wild good chase: final episode tomorrow…