MR60

Bricked APM 2.5 ?

Posted by Hugues on February 8, 2014 at 9:59am

Hi,

I have a very strange symptom with my 1 year old APM2.5 board.

I have used it without any issue for the last year. The board was sitting for the last three months in my Octo. Never used it since then.

Today I tried to connect to it via 3DR radio, powering the board with a lipo->"Connection time out" in mission  planner. I looked for every possible cause : cables, configuration, etc.

The radio are fine since I could change the local and remote radio units through the config utility. So that puts the radio out of the loop.

 I then decided to connect directly by USB cable -> Windows looks strangely enough for a driver and does not find it. What the heck...It always worked and the driver was already installed on this PC.

So I tried to reinstall manually the APM driver -> Windows did not want to install it.

Then I realized I had left the lipo battery connected at the same time of the USB cable. I disconnected the Lipo battery. Then Windows found the APM MEga 2560.

For 3 seconds the LEDs turn on on APM when I plug the USB cable but turn off after and the COM ports disappears from the device manager.

Could I have a bricked APM ? What would cause this as between the last time the board worked and now, nothing changed on software or hardware level ?

Should I ship the card back to 3DR for analysis ?

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Replies

  • Kim Eggert May 5, 2014 at 2:53pm

    i think 57k is suggested because a higher baudrate will cause too many errors in transmission,I just ordered one of those also, its a hc-sr04 with an extra pcb mounted, i think the extra board have a controller that do the measurement calculations and converts it to apm data, but lets see

  • Kim Eggert May 5, 2014 at 1:39pm

    Hi Mate

    Strange, but my problem was not the heartbeat, but to my best guess the bootloader, i returned mine and got a new one, it was like all was working allright, except that it coulden't upgrade firmware (bootloader mode) but the new apm Works just fine, by the way, are the firmware in the radio's up to date, and are they equally updatede ?

  • Kim Eggert May 5, 2014 at 12:58pm

    Hi Pluess

    Remember to set the baudrate to 57600 when using 3dr radio

    (and select the right comport, it also change when you shift from usb to radio, and also remember if you have both usb and radio connected, usb override radio)

  • Developer
    Craig Elder February 13, 2014 at 3:18pm

    The arduino driver is here C:\Program Files (x86)\Mission Planner\Drivers

  • Kim Eggert February 13, 2014 at 12:38pm

    Look what i found can this be the answer to the upgrading issue

    Sorry if this is a duplicate post of someone elses  -  kind of bleary eyed after solving this issue. Just wanted to notify people in case this is a  3D Robotics production programming issue that customers might find later on.

    First a question so not to get lost in my description of the problem. Is the bootloader for Ardupilot identical to the Arduino bootloader ? or is a custom bootloader needed ?

    I received a Ardupilot 2.5+ last week to upgrade my XAircraft X650 v8 frame. Because of the XAircraft ESCs, I need to modify the PWM software of the Ardupilot.  I went to install freshly compiled software and it failed to install - both with Mission Planner and with Arduino IDE. Thus being an absolute Arduino noob, the start of an all-nighter debug session.

    In a nutshell, the Mega2560 Lock Bit "BLB1" was set in the factory to "LPM_SPM_DISABLE". This prevented firmware upgrades.

    Fortunately, I anticipated that I would eventually corrupt the bootloader and ordered a Pololu USB AVR programmer. After installing AVR Studio 6, wrestling with it's major quirks, connecting to the incorrect ISP pins (I soldered on a 6 pin connector for the "other" on board CPU), fortunately figuring out the correct ISP is disguised with the accessory servo pins, I could read the fuses and lock bits settings.

    After erasing the flash memory, I could now modify the BLB1 lock bit and reinstall the bootloader via AVR Studio 6, and then use Mission Planner to upload "custom firmware". I used the Arduino 1.

    Arduino-1.0.3\hardware\arduino\bootloaders\stk500v2\stk500boot_v2_mega2560.hex bootloader. Seems to function correctly - will know shortly after putting the APM back together. But first......

    Off to desoldering the 6 pins I placed thinking the empty pad was the ISP connector. The APM cover won't fit with those newly added pins.

    Oh heck, I will mention one other possible production issue. The red-wire on the UBlox GPS to APM cable seems to be reversed. Doesn't affect operation, since the connectors are keyed, but IMHO a wee bit strange seeing the red wire aligned up with the ground pin.

    Thanks for any information on the bootloader.

    Sorry for my ramblings. Cheers

    • MR60
      Hugues > Kim Eggert February 13, 2014 at 10:58pm

      Hi,

      I have tried to reflash the atmega 2560 boot loader with a USB asp avr programmer and the six pins you mention, via arduino IDE: I get an error. How did you unlocked the lock bit to be able to flash the boot loader?

    • Kim Eggert > Hugues February 14, 2014 at 4:30pm

      The problem should be a missing bootloader,,to solve the problem i got this link from a guy on youtube,

      i will try it tomorrow.

      http://code.google.com/p/ardupilot-mega/wiki/APM2Encoder

    • MR60
      Hugues > Kim Eggert February 15, 2014 at 2:14am

      Hi, I did a reflash of the ppm encoder succesfully, but this did not solve the inability to communicate with the APM board to load a new firmware. No joy...

    • Kim Eggert > Hugues February 15, 2014 at 2:32am

      To bad mate

      i haven't tryed it yet, i will later, there is also another way explained here in one of the comments

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPn9IPatssI

    • MR60
      Hugues > Kim Eggert February 15, 2014 at 7:23am

      thx, I tried that procedure from your link. It works until the last of the three avrdude command where I get this error:

      3702863227?profile=originalI don't see what else I could try and this is probably the last confirmation the card is definitively broken.

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