"Woohoo! Fixed it.  In case others see this issue, for me there was solder that shorted together pins 11 and 12 on the Atmel.  11 is ground and 12 is RX2 which is how the ADC sends data back to the Atmel.  Once I broke the solder…"

"John, contact DIY Drones tech support. All boards are tested at the factory, but they can walk you through a process to pinpoint what's likely a user soldering error. If that's not it, they can help diagnose."

"Hmm I am only getting zeros as well.  My board just arrived today.  I've tried both the "test" mode and the ADC test program directly.   Thanks! John"

"@Hein: is it possible to have a better picture as I really think to have the same problem? Thx!"

" Could not resist, while learning and developing I am "flying" a bread board with APM."

"Just read some reports that state tarmac is not the best due to the non reflective nature. It seems like these are not all equal, there are industrial ones available for either dark or light surfaces. Starting to think they might be too unreliable…"

"@Melih Was thinking of the same, would be great if you could get it reliable, having distance to ground from 300 meters opens up all sorts of possibilities. Over an above landings it could be used to fly low, "hug" the ground, at say 10-20…"

"@Andre Have a look at these cross platform libraries that play well with Qt : http://qextserialport.sourceforge.net/ http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_40_0/doc/html/boost_asio/overview/serial_ports.html"

"Put in a temporary jumper to fix so I can continue testing with the software. It obscures the defect. If I redo the jumper to be more reliable and neat I will take a clean picture. "

"Thanks for reporting back. Can you post a pic of the bad trace, in case others have this problem? (I haven't seen it on any other boards, but these things do happen). Great detective work!"

"@Chris The issue was with the main ArdupilotMega board, one of the connector pin holes was not connected to the rest of the trace to the 1280. Had to put a jumper wire across from the pin to the 1280 to correct it. Looks like the board had a defect…"

"@Chris @Thomas Using Arduino IDE (v 0018) to monitor the output. Back to basics, Chris's suggestion is the route, re-check all the soldering. Thx"

"It works fine on all my boards, too. Hein, check your soldering?"

"Hein, Interesting. The code runs fine on my APM and returns the expected values. I assume that you are using the Arduino IDE monitor to view the data stream from the APM? Regards, TCIII"

"@Thomas that is the code I am using, it is the same as the one listed in my post"

"@Chris the board is powered from USB"