No Lights in Wifly shield with Fez Domino

Hi,

Received my Fez Domino and its great, except that it’s already giving me problems with my WiFly Shield :confused:

When i plug the WiFly into my Arduino Mega the leds on the shield immediately starts blinking, but when i try the same with the Fez Domino no leds light up on the shield. When i put the shield back on the Arduino the blinking lights are back on it.

I then downloaded the WiFly Shield drivers for the Fez and tried them, which left me with a “Failed to init SPIUART chip” exception ??

heeeeeeelp :confused:

Arduino doesn’t have 3.3V+5V but FEZ Domino has both voltage…
Now, when sparkfun designed the wifly shield they didn’t have 3.3V because they didn’t have domino back then and so they had to add their own 3.3V regulator on the shield!
Se the schematics http://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/DevTools/Arduino/Wifly_Shield-v14.pdf

So, now you have 2 options:

  1. Just plug in a power pack in the power connector (good option for beginners)
  2. remove the 3.3V regulator off the shield and then add a small wire to get 3.3V right from FEZ Domino (good option for experienced users)

Are you going to make a driver for the Wifly and enter it in the contest?

Wow !! fast response !!

I compared the Fez to the Arduino Mega

On the Arduino i have
3.30V on the 3.3V pin
5.03V on the 5V pin
4.55V on the Vin pin

on the Fez i have

3.30V on the 3.3Vpin
4.74V on the 5V pin
3.20V on the Vin pin

So is it the lower voltage on the Vin pin or on the 5V pin on the Fez thats giving me problems ?

should i steal 5V for the Vin pin on the WiFly or what ?

Where would you have me plug in a power pack ? in the Fez ?? :confused:

and yeah, i’m going for a WiFly driver for the contest…and a secret project as well :wink:

Thanks for your fast reply :slight_smile:

Yup, when i supplied 5V for the Vin instead of the Vin from the Fez, lights were flashing nicely :slight_smile:

it sucks though, the WiFly Shield wont work without jumper cables on either Arduino Mega or Fez, kinda defeats the purpose of a shield :confused:

ah well, it seems to be working now , just doesnt look very clean with 6 jumper cables and 6 extra headers stacked on top of a couple of screwterminal boards :confused:

i still need the WiFly to work on both Arduino and Fez, so no modding the shield for me …

What you are measuring on VIN is just floating voltage.

[quote]should i steal 5V for the Vin pin on the WiFly or what ?
[/quote]

I already gave you the 2 options you need to solve your problem :wink:

VIN in our case the power coming from the power connector. Maybe the mega uses 5V as a VIN?

I will give you a third option, if you have a diode then ad a diode to forward the voltage from 5V to VIN…you must use a diode to protect VIN from feeding back to 5V!

Yes in the black power connector in the lower left corner http://www.tinyclr.com/images/products/TCLR-0001_large.jpg

You should complain to sparkfun :wink:

Why do you have 6 jumpers? I do not understand :confused:
All you have to do is place the wifly shield on top of FEZ Domino and it will work fine (you will need one of the 3 options to get power to VIN, but that is one simple wire to add)

I assume it is possible to run the FEZ with the WiFly shield and a power pack and a usb connection?

I stacked the digital pins and the analog pins on 2 sets of headers and a screw terminal board, and the i jumpered the power pins straight through from the Fez except for the Vin which i took from 5V on the screw terminal board. It was the fastest as i donr have another power source right now, and dont want to mod anything permanently :wink:

I suck at electronics, but now i can begin coding :wink:

Thanks for your help :slight_smile:

yes this is all you need