OK got it updated, FEZConfig can see it now and confirms the firmware is good.
Visual studio sees it, and code deploys!
We’re all good!
Now the adventure really begins. 
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yeah, and it’s best described as “a quirky novel, full of twists and turns” 
My inner monologue goes something more like
#%(*@^&
%@#*(^!
#%!@^) @!%^*) !!%!%)( !@)(% SONOFA !%)!^)
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On the good news I have 3 fully working boards on my desk now and I’m starting on building #4.
I sort of effed up a G30 earlier, those pins are… fragile.
I was going to make 5 boards, but now it’s 4…
Tack flux is your friend.
Love the 45deg xtal - very artistic 
Why the use of tants for your decoupling? MLCC 0.1uf are waayyyyyy cheaper and smaller and will allow getting closer to the VDD pins.
But in saying that…looks good
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Already done testing on the throughhole module, time for big league now with the SoC lol
I used the wrong crystal footprint on the board for the 32k and I’m like “well, crap. What do I do now?” 
Smaller is bad, my hands are too shaky for 0402 stuff. I wanted to keep the board all 1206 sized so I could actually work with the stuff… And in 1206, all I had was tants…
Board 4 was a failure. Get a hard short with the MCU mounted. Take it off, leave everything else alone, no short. Look for bridges, none to find.
Wonder if I cooked the G30?
It was weird. It worked for a while. I actually got firmware on it. Then mounted my throughhole components, and suddenly it won’t work and my VRM is generating a lot of heat.
I must have completed the ground plane for one of the pins on the last row when I mounted the throughhole components. Tried re-mounting the G30 three times and no joy. Off, no short. On, hard short.
I’m out of G30’s now so I can’t play anymore today. Guess that means it’s officially the weekend. Only been working since 4 AM. Now it’s after 9… where’s the time go??
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When I get STM bridges I run a bit of tacky flux down the pins then flick out with a small horse shoe tip, works a treat.
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I would put a pulldown on PB2 for your final boards. Leaving this pin in an unknown state could cause you issues in the field. By setting this pin to the correct level as per the datasheet requirment on bootup, you guarantee that it will behave properly.
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Thumbs up on this one. Tacky flux and a good size bit will re-flow the pins very nicely. Works a treat on 0.5mm pitch devices.
Ooooh I thought you said earlier “there is no pulldown resistor on PB2” thinking you were telling me “hey don’t put one on there” not “dude you need to put one on there.”
I see it on the schematic now I don’t know how in the heck I missed that.
So PB2 can’t be used as a GPIO port?
On my bench I have that running right now in a longer term test with one of these finished boards, a pair of interrupt lines coming in to PB2 and PB12 . It works but … should I not be using it?
I memorialized the moment of “IT WORKS” with the obligatory “I NEED TO CLEAN MY BENCH” pic
And then there were two…
And then three…
That previously had a G400 running a two month long test on an LTC 16 bit ADC w/ a couple of MCP23017 boards I made to test long term I2C and program stability. The LTC is hooked to a bunch of thermistors and a photoresistor for testing. The MCP’s are just for writing the voltage out in binary on the LED"s, because I’m a nerd.
The other nerd in the photo is my son, who works as a developer in our firm.
The test program was deployed to one of the new G30 boards and is humming along fine.
(Note there’s two MCP23017’s on the board itself for breaking out an additional 32 GPIO’s on the G30, while there’s two more on the solder breadboards, and an LTC ADC on the left breakout board. So technically that G30 gained 64 GPIO’s with interrupt capability and 16 zone ADC.
(This will be building towards replacing the pneumatics in Satan, the 1970’s furnace from hell, evenutally)
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Yes it can, after boot up. Just make sure that the pin is low on boot up and after this you can change it to an output and do what you like with it.
I’d put a resistor on this to guarantee a level otherwise you might run into problems with booting some day. Once running it’s OK but it’s that boot process you need to be sure of.
Is that anti-static carpet you are using? I hope so as that stuff can generate one heck of a lot of static if you are not careful.
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Dude, that’s sooooo yesterday !
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How do you tell (physically) that a processor has booted? Is any specific pin driven low or high on a successful CPU boot? That was one of the aggravating things yesterday. Until I got USB device to show up in windows, I was guessing at what was wrong - and it turned out to be a long list of guesses even on a simple board like this. It’d be nice if I could just touch a pin and say “ok processor says it’s good, moving along…”
A couple of uses would be if there is a need for other devices have to be held in a wait state before they are brought online. or if one were developing a fault detect circuit to signal “I’m in trouble send cheetos” to an external watchdog.
No it’s cheap office carpet remnants. It gets a grounding bar (flat angle iron) screwed to the front edge in the winter and wired directly to building ground so you shock yourself every time you sit down.
It’s homage to my grandpa’s old TV shop. When I was growing up, and grandpa was raising me, he had a workbench with carpet just like that in his tv repair shop that he ran out of the front of his house. He’d set me up there and let me play with his multimeter and pretend to ‘fix’ whatever dead stuff he had laying around. It’s strange because these days (he’s closing in on 90) I’m picking up the dark art for real.
The TV / VCR repair business eventually went the way of the dodo bird with cheap disposable consumer electronics. The shop he ran at home and the job he had at Tiptons for a couple decades went away. He went back to work on the railroad freezing in the Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana winters as an engineer. Finally in his 60’s he was accepted to a conductor position and got to drive the trains, instead of wading through hip deep snow in -20 wind chill cutting cars, or sweating in the 100+F 120F heat index midsummer days.
So when I opened a computer repair shop at the ripe old age of 19 I cleared out all of his old electronics repair stuff that wasn’t applicable and took over his bench and his old shop came back to life.
When I opened my first office I built benches and used the same generic bland gray carpet because otherwise I don’t feel at home in my workshop. It’s a … superstitious thing.
The static issue is remedied by bolting a piece of angle iron under the front lip and grounding it to building ground. It also has the unfortunate side effect of forcefully discharging you when you pull up to the bench in the stool, which can be quite painful in IL winters, but a necessary evil.
(ETA; I suspect the carpet helped to mitigate amount of cussing if he dropped a vacuum tube. I think butterfingers are a genetic trait as in my computer shop before I put in carpeting on the benches that was a real issue - slip with a 3.5" hard drive, which didn’t have the best shock resistance back in the early 90’s, and it was toast after falling only 1.5" or whatever on to the bench. Carpet gives it a little cushion when things hit the deck. Just have to be mindful of static, as you said.)
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Don’t have pictures of Grandpa’s shop, was before the age of digital cameras (they didn’t exist yet), but my first shop after I moved out of his place in 1995;
I don’t have any pictures of the next two offices (I started and went out of business several times on PC repair back in the 90’s before it sunk in that it’s a dying industry), but later when we started building servers the build room got the same gray carpet.
And that time we didn’t fail or go out of business. We went to a million dollar a year revenue and stayed there.
So the gray carpet has mojo, yo.
From that point on I have had a carpeted bench. And it’s not going away anytime soon. 
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In 2015 I bought this old bank building down town in my home city.
One of these G30’s and a pair of those 16 port IO boards I threw together on soldered breadboard will soon be used to reverse engineer the security system wiring inside the huge vault
We’re renovating the building still, where the safe deposit box privacy booths were is where my new bench is being built.
IT WILL HAVE GRAY CARPET TOO.
Anyway soon there’ll be a G30 running in the vault to trace all of the old security system wiring out and figure out what is what with reed switches and other sensors.
It’ll be the most secure G30 in the world for a while, that Mosler Magna 2 vault is the same exact vault used the the federal reserve in Bermuda, and I think California treasury has one too. Very robust.
(Yes, that’s a floating baby. The building came haunted with free floating babies. Actually, that’s Gabby, our youngest adopted daughter, “hanging out” while we did our final inspection walkthrough back in 2015. My wife is camera shy and jumped back in to the vault when she saw me holding my phone up)
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