2 dead hydras

I believe that Amit and I have the same issue. After initializing with either Pin 8 to ground or with boot.bin on an sd card, the board shows up as an “Unknown device” in the device manager. It does not show up as a COM port.

Can anyone at GHI address this problem?

@ brianf - It happens to me with Hydra after fw crash. I had to go to an other Win 7 PC to flash fw with SAM-BA.

At the moment, I don’t have access to another computer. Are there any other suggestions?

it shows up in Devices and Printers, see screenshots

@ Amit Puri & brianf

What type of USB sockets are you connecting the devices to? Are they USB 2 or 3? USB 3 seem to have communication issues. Perhaps there is some kind of compatibility error. Try to connect the devices in a USB 2 port.

Can either of you try your devices on another computer, perhaps a windows 7 machine with USB 2?

@ brianf

What OS are you using? Are you on a virtual machine?

@ Amit Puri

You said you have Windows 8, are you using a virtual machine?

I’ve just duplicated this problem (and now also seem to have a useless Hydra). Here’s what did…

  1. Deployed a hello world app to my Hydra to be sure everything is working fine.
  2. Using FEZ Config, deployed non-ethernet firmware with a friendly name of “FEZ Hydra_FEZ Hydra Amit Puri”. Everything came back up fine and looked good in “Devices & Printers” and in FEZ Config. However, VS2012 could not find the device and deploy.
  3. Using FEZ Config, deployed non-ethernet firmware again with friendly name of “Gadgeteer”. VS still could not connect.
  4. Using FEZ Config, deployed the ethernet firmware. Device comes up and device name looks good. However, I can no longer ping or update the firmware.

I believe there’s either something wrong with the Hydra firmware or FEZ Config. I’m going to keep trying to get it back to a usable state. :frowning:

@ Aron -

Need to check on USB part, once at home.

I am using Vostro Laptop, Windows 8 64 bit, no virtual machine. I have 4 USB ports, I have already tried on 3 of them.

BTW, it worked on VS2010 on the same hardware and OS.

With which version of the firmware?

@ ianlee74

When you deployed the Ethernet Firmware, did you put a ENC28 module on socket 3?

Nope.

I can’t recollect the firmware version, but installed last release sometime in Dec/Jan.

I don’t have ENC28 module and not connected.

I did checked network checkbox, by mistake initally on first try.

For Hydra and Cerberus, the ENC28 need to be connected to the respective boards in order for the Ethernet Firmware to work. In this case socket 3 for Hydra, socket 6 for Cerberus and socket 1 for Cerbuino Bee, otherwise, the boards will get stuck in a loop waiting for the ENC28 module to respond.

Good call, Aron. I added the ENC28 module and I was at least able to get firmware installed again. However, VS still will not find the device. It just counts to 60 iterations and gives up.

The latest firmware version is from late April, early May. The latest version number is 4.2.5.0. Download the latest SDK from GHI and please try the process again.

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If you are using a powered hub, I think there is some kind of communication issue between USB and VS2012. Try to connect straight from the PC. That has been working for me.

Closing VS and re-opening it got me going again.

However, it seems we’ve discovered his problem. He has the ethernet firmware installed but he doesn’t have an ENC28 module to get himself out of the loop. Is there any other way out?

I am uncertain of what can be done. I can try tomorrow and see if I can try to bypass the ENC28 lockup.

Feature request - add a warning to FEZ Config about this problem if someone tries to install the ethernet firmware. Of course, the better solution is to add a timeout to the loop that’s looking for the ENC28 if possible.

I agree. This is a perfect opportunity for community contribution :slight_smile: