Arduino nano

[RON]

It’s unbelievable how complex these things are. It amazes me who the he** designs these in the first place.

Ron.

[Pchristy]

When I first started working in the video-tape department of a Big Broadcasting Company (many years ago!), we had a new-fangled edit suite that offered "computerised" control of the editing process. The "computer" comprised a great many TTL chips, driving Nixie tubes (remember them?) for the displays. It was horrendously unreliable! That was until the magic trick was discovered! Never turn it off! As long as it was left switched on 24/7, it performed flawlessly! (Whilst consuming enough power to run a small village!!!)

http://www.vtoldboys.com/eeco01.htm

Fast forward a dozen years, and I'm now working for a different company, who have just installed a new, computerised editing system! It is horrendously unreliable! The time-code generator (fundamental to the operation) was entirely constructed from 74 series TTL chips. It got hot. Very hot! And the cooling fans were completely un-ducted, doing little more than stir the hot air! At great cost, the chips were replaced with low-power Schottky versions, after which it ran flawlessly - but by that time was years past its sell-by date!

I once built a whole RC encoder and decoder from standard TTL chips. It all worked, but the current consumption was horrendous......!



--
Pete

[jackdaw]

I was working on logic before IC's, when Pontius Pilot was still learning to fly, on these little 'treasures'. My, I feel old!
http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/phil ... /index.htm
They were all combined in various combinations on large plug in cards housed in two shoulder high interconnected cabinets. The various cards provided regeneration of the memory, read write facility, tone recognition etc. A volatile memory was provided by 9(I think) magneto striction delay lines connected in series. Number read out was by nixie tubes. This equipment was used in the 50,000 call through testing of new telephone exchanges(Strowger, cross-bar, TXE2, TXE4) back when dinosures still roamed the planet and the GPO still had lots of over head copper lines, least ways it seams that long to me.

[Martin]

It’s unbelievable how complex these things are. It amazes me who the he** designs these in the first place.

Ron.

I've recently begun programming the STM32 range of chips - they come in various sizes but even the simple ones make the Atmel ATmega 328 seem delightfully simple in comparison.
For example, configuring the clock signal on the cheap STM32F103 chips used on the 'blue pill' boards (which can be programmed using the Arduino IDE): the Atmel chips can use a built in oscillator or a crystal/resonator, and you can divide the clock rate by setting some fuses - but the STM chip has more clocks and you have to decide which one(s) you want to use and how to multiply/divide the rates and run them to the different buses and peripheral parts of the chip as they all run at different clock rates - below is pictured the helpful tool that simplifies this task down to something vaguely manageable!

[Guest]

Hi chaps its me again
sorry about this but I'm not making any progress. I have a USBasp device. Its not all-together clear if that unit is working correctly or not. It may also be a contradiction in terms that is causing a problem. Having connected up the USBasp device to the Arduino IDE and selected the target board I go into the tools menu and have selected programmer: USBasp.
I have in the IDE the script I want to load onto the NANO. The NANO is connected to the USBasp device with the approriate cable and all the LED show life. If I understand all the tutorials I'm supposed to press Burn Bootloader. Its my understanding we didn't want a bootloader. I'm also aware that the USBasp device does not give rise to a detectable USB port number. Again I don't know if its working correctly. I would have assumed that the sketch I wanted loaded into the NANO I would need the complie and upload button pressing in the normal way.
I have some more cables arriving tomorrow so I can cobble together a UNO to a NANO in the old style to try and get a script across. However I'm not at all clear on what buttons to press or why.

[Martin]

Don't click "burn bootloader" instead select "upload using programmer" and whatever sketch you have in the IDE should load and run on the Nano.

[Flynn]

Following on from Martins advice with a bit of background, What operating system are you using on your computer?

When using the USBasp you have to use the upload via programmer command, when selected, the IDE will first verify and compile the firmware according to the options you have set under the tools/board section and then upload it using the programmer, you don't need to manually verify the firmware first.

The usual advice when trying out new hardware is upload the blink sketch first (file/examples/01.basics/blink), this proves the hardware is working with simple code.

If that fails report back with the error message...

[FBMinis]

Good news: a smaller cable did it