Friday, August 25, 2006

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Uploading new firmware on Make Controller

I don’t know the difference between a jumper and a short circuit, so it took me a while to figure out why I couldn’t upload a program ( okay firmware ) to my make controller a second time. After reading in the documentation about the ERASE pin and SAM-BA on the forum, I wasn’t any further. Where the heck is J2.21? What is a jumper? How do I short?



Fear not, gentle reader... The little plastic square guys are jumpers and you can temporarily borrow one from the board. Just make a mental not of it’s position, so you can put it back. Look inside the jumper and you will see metal contacts. Here is my controller with a jumper sticking up off the board.


Grabbing the jumper

Place this on the 3rd and 4th pin in from the left on the back row as you see here in the photo. You will notice that whatever program was running will now freeze. Congratulations you just shorted the ERASE pin and your controller will reboot into sam-ba mode. You can also use any peice of metal to make this reset happen.


Shorting out the erase pin

Uploading new firmware on Make Controller


After the first time you upload firmware with mchelper here is the processes for uploading your new firmware onto the Make Controller.


  1. Short the jumper

  2. Power cycle the controller

  3. Upload firmware with mchelper

  4. Power cycle the controller



back in action

We have been busy all summer with work, outdoor projects, and vacations. But we're falling into winter time, so it’s time to get indoor crafty. I have some ideas for embedded art projects, so I picked up a microcontroller programming board and will be posting my progress here.