Board has gone unresponsive, please help

NETMF & Gadgeteer
1

Hi All;

While working on my project today, my Cerberus board stopped responding over USB, it would run it’s per-minute clock, and post data to my web service, but would not accept a connection from VS or Fez Config. I fired up STDFU as per https://www.ghielectronics.com/docs/46/fez-cerb-family-developers-guide and it responded fine in DFU mode, I followed the steps to erase and download the cerb family DFU, and when it resets I have a green light but still no response across USB (I disconnected all other modules aside from the USB SP one).

Can anyone advise on the next steps for troubleshooting this?

2

Step 1 I always use to help troubleshoot is looking in Device Manager to see what presents itself to the OS, and in what mode that implies. But the bad news is that if you’ve reflashed the firmware in DFU mode, then you should be able to see the device in MFDeploy/VS to deploy against; sounding like possible hardware issue. Any chance you had a wiring glitch around the time things started going pearshaped ?

3

@ Brett - Off topic, sorry, but I must ask.

around the time things started going pearshaped ?

What is the pearshaped reference? I need to know so I can incorporate it into my blabber when needed.

4

The “failure” paragraph shows it’s probably of anglo-origin, but basically means “something that started to go wrong”

5

Unfortunately there was no change in wiring, I’ve had a Moisture, TempHumid, Light, and Ethernet module connected the whole time (until I removed them to troubleshoot).

6

If I use the DFU Tester and click GetStatus in the BasicDFU tab, I get:

I assume that means the firmware is messed up.

Could this be from having the 2015 SDK installed? Maybe there’s a bad firmware?

7

Yeah, the bad news is that it shows in the Device Manager as Cerb-Family (non-commercial use) but will not show in FEZconfig, MFDeploy, or VS.

8

And it turns out something stupid is happening. My desktop will talk to it using DFU, but not VS/MFdeploy/FEZ, but my laptop will. :wall:

At any rate, it looks like I’ll be able to make this work, no idea what made it so my desktop suddenly can’t talk to my mainboard.

9

@ Squeebee - The only thing I can think of is that the drivers got into an invalid state. I would uninstall everything related to our SDK and reinstall. Including the ST tool.

10

@ John - Thanks, I’ll give that a shot!