Debugging Days

Last night we spend atleast 3 hours to track down a little bug in the cpu fuse settings. After running first tests on the hardware we got debug uart and some basic sreg addressing working.

Then we started to implement a sram read/write round trip. We found out that we read for all sram cells the same value as the last value which was written. So we stepped through the schematics and traced all IO lines and logic involved in the sram addressing process. First we analysed the sreg setup and the address counters. Then we checked the busdriver and the sram multiplexer. But this looked all out. Finally we found the problm that the WR line from the AVR to the sram is not pulled high when set in software.

So we looked for shortcircuits but didn’t find anything. Last guess was the mcu is broken, but finally we found out that we had a false fuse setting. So our IO pin was configured to passthru the clock signal on that pin. Fixed that and so basic sram read/write is working.

Tonite we gonna test bulk transfer. Hopefully this time we don’t have so nasty bugs.

Debugging Days Read More ยป