Tag Archives: USB to Serial Bridge

Design Decision

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Side Project:

I am moving forward with the Compass toy prototyping.  I am designing a simple breakout PCB for testing the display. I may put the display breakout for sale on Tindie.

Project Intent:

The primary goal of this project/blog is to show electronics design start to finish.

The design goal is an inexpensive in circuit chip programmer that will work for most devices available.

Options:

The Raspberry Pi Zero was released November of 2015 at a price of $5 US each.  I even got one with a copy of MagPi.  To Make it run any code at all, it needs a power supply and microSD card.

Of course I could continue with the current design.

Common components:

Both the Raspberry Pi and the current design need the following components.

Printed Circuit Board
Battery for power supply and charging circuit
Vpp Supply
Level Shifter Circuit
External ADC(Still undecided for current design)
USB to serial Bridge (not sure it’s necessary for R Pi)

Additional components for Raspberry Pi:

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New Build

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Update:

The level shifter came in this week.

Populating the board:

I installed parts out of my kit in the order that I grabbed them, until I had enough to do the basic test.  The board powered up and the blue LED on the ESP-12F blinked once.  Unfortunately the board wouldn’t program.

I started probing with my Oscilloscope.  The serial data lines looked normal when I tried to program the board. Then I looked at Reset and GPIO0 lines and found that GPIO0 was oscillating at 24 MHz. The Reset line was working as I expected it to.  I used a 1 MOhm resister as a pull down on GPIO15. I chose 1 MOhm to reduce the amount of current when A_Sel is High.  I knew this could cause me trouble, GPIO15 is used to put the chip into SD card mode. That may be too much resistance.  I changed that resistor to 10 KOhms to see if it made a difference. It did!

I uploaded the defaults, then my code. My simple serial menu came up in the terminal. With it working, I went on to populate the rest of the board.  I came up short 2 components, the pin header I use for the lithium cell and Q2.  I grabbed both of those from the last build and completed populating the board. I reconnected it to my computer, re-connected the serial terminal and the serial menu is still working.

SPI RAM Testing:

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Hantek MSO5202 Mixed Signal Oscilloscope review

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mso5202d(Picture taken from Aliexpress.com)

Features:
This scope has 2 analog channels and 16 digital channels With Bandwidth up to 200 MHz.
1 Million sample points for the analog channels.
512K sample points for the Logic Analyzer channels
7 inch 800×400 color LCD display
USB Host for flash drives
USB client for PC control

Pros:
Capture 16 channels digital and 2 channels Analog simultaneously.
Export captured data to CSV file (useful for analysis)
Linux based (hackable!)
Familiar knob/face layout
Bright clear display

Cons:
No protocol analysis built in. No way to add protocol analysis.
No Linux PC support
Occasionally crashes
D0 is only digital trigger line

My experience with this scope:

The Purchase:
I bought the scope off of Aliexpress.com.  I knew I wanted at least 100MHz Bandwidth. I also didn’t have a lot to spend.   There wasn’t a big cost savings to go to the 100 MHz scope, so I decided to go ahead and get the 200 MHz Version.  Since I have bought the scope, I have seen information on how to hack the 60 or 70 MHz models to get the full 200 MHz performance. Assuming the scope lives up to their specs, I am happy to pay for the Higher bandwidth.  This scope is still a bargain with a price less than $500 US.  The seller shipped it to me for free with DHL shipping. The scope was delivered within 7 days.

Unboxing:
The scope came in the manufacturers box inside of another box it just fit inside.  I cut the tape on the outer box and opened it to see a handle on top of the manufacturers box.  I started to lift by that handle and the bottom of the manufacturers box fell out.  I had only lifted it a few inches so the bubble plastic protecting the scope protected it from damage.

First use:
I connected the power cord and nothing else. Turned on the power and it booted up quickly (less than 10 seconds). I then dug out the probes and hooked them up. The probes came with color rings to help identify which channel I was using.  Both probes came with red rings on both ends of the probe.  I looked at the scope and saw that the color for channel 1 is yellow and the color for channel 2 is blue.  I grabbed one of the probes and switched the colored rings to yellow and connected it to channel 1.  I repeated that process with blue rings for channel 2.  I connected the probes to the calibration tang on the front of the scope and did a quick adjustment of each probe.  The knobs have a good feel to them and the waveforms change the way I anticipated for each turn.  This made this scope feel very familiar.  All of this was done without reading the manual. So far so good!

Tinkering:
I have a circuit that the LCD got damaged on and I wanted to see how the Logic Analyzer worked.  The LCD is controlled by SPI. I hooked up the data lines, figured out how to trigger off of D0 and it kind of worked.  It wasn’t real clear how to get to the Logic Analyzer to begin with. I found it with playing.  Then I figured the chip select line of the LCD would be a good choice to trigger off of.  There is a short glitch just after power up that meant the scope triggered way too early.  I was disappointed that I couldn’t change the trigger to a different digital channel, I had to move the connections around instead. To make the connections to the LCD, I had to solder several 30 gauge wires to the data lines I was interested in. These wires are fragile so changing the connections to them was difficult.  The scoped locked up or did weird things while I was tinkering.

Data Capture:
I was also disappointed that there was no simple data analysis for the Logic Analyzer system.  I captured a chunk of the LCD SPI data and saved it as CSV file to a flash drive.  I put the flash drive into my computer and opened the CSV file with LibreOffice Calc.  With some complex cell calculations I was able to get Calc to show me the data that was sent for each time chip select was active. The good news is it showed me the circuit wasn’t damaged and a replacement LCD should fix the device.(The scope served it’s purpose)

Overall:
I found this scope to be very intuitive to use for analog signals.  The Logic Analyzer function is very useful but is not very intuitive and is missing some features.  If I had this when I was testing the SPI on the Uprogrammer board, I would have found my problems much quicker.  I watched a few of the hack videos on YouTube. They connect a USB to Serial bridge to the system and issue a few Linux commands. Linux is a great place to start hacking. On the back is a punch out with a Networking symbol next to it.  If it turns out that there is a chip that supports ethernet on the board, I would like to install the ethernet jack and see what happens.  From the hack videos, I can see there is a place on the PCB for the ethernet Jack.

My Opinion:
This an excellent scope for the price.  I have seen online videos that indicate problems when approaching the higher bandwidth limits of the scope.  I don’t believe these problems will affect me.  If you need high precision in near 200 MHz, I would suggest looking for a better scope.  Otherwise this will make a fine tool on your bench.  Firmware is still being developed for this scope, so I expect it to get better over time with updates. Since it is Linux based I also expect the community to hack it for better features than just a bandwidth upgrade.

Have you used one of these scopes?  Have you worked with one near 200 MHz?  What is your feelings about the lack of digital features? How about the occasional lock up?

Sigma Delta still causing resets.

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When I first built this revision of PCB, the board would reboot a lot.  That turned out to be the mis-wiring of the SPI RAM.  Part of that process in trouble shooting that board, I had guessed that I had a noisy power connection to the Wi-Fi module. So one thing that I had tried was adding a large reservoir capacitor and a small filter capacitor near the power pins of the module. Unless I am drawing too much current from the voltage regulator, this should eliminate any possible power issues.

This means my first test is to measure how much current is being drawn from the voltage regulator.  To do that I removed the jumper that bypassed the lithium cell charger and attached 3.7V to the PCB from a bench power supply.  To do this I removed all the test pins I had soldered to the module and soldered one to +BATT and another one to GND.  I connected my meter in series with the power supply and turned it all back on.  I measured the current consumed between 75 and 80 mA for the whole range of 0 to 99 prescaler.  This measurement was made with the radio inactive.

I think I can rule out the power supply as my problem.  Next I decided to change the software to take steps of 10 instead of 1 for adjusting the prescaler.  If the failure is because of an accumulated error, this should happen later and I should be able to get a number larger than 100 without a failure. I re-soldered the  bypass of the Lithium Cell charger and uploaded the change. I got to 91 No Failure. At 101 it still failed.  I change the step to 30 and when I got to 120, I got a reset cause:2. (maybe there is a clue here, This means external reset.)  I found this in the 2c-ESP8266_SDK_Programming Guide.pdf file from the Espressif BBS.

There are two pins on the module that can be used for external reset.  Since the serial to usb bridge is controlling the reset line, I decided to look into the EN pin first. It looked good with the right resistor in place to pull it up.  I then started looking through the code to make sure the Sigma Delta was configured to the correct pin.  Turns out that it wasn’t configured to output on any pin.  There was a missing statement in the code setting pin4 to output the sigma delta channel.  I added that line back in, saved, recompiled, uploaded and tested again. It still is failing.

Going back to the external reset, I decided to put lower value pullup resistors on the reset lines. I changed them from 10 K to 1 K.  This should reduce any affect of noise on the pins and still not draw too much current when pulled low. It still fails in the same way.  I have another project where the sigma delta is working very well.  The main difference I can see is that on this project I am reading the sigma delta twice before I write to it. In my other project, it reads the register once.  So I am going to make a simple uint8 variable to retain the value I am writing to the Sigma Delta prescaler.

It is still not fixed.  Have you seen this problem? Have you solved it?

 

 

New PCBs

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The PCBs arrived this week.  I really like the way my Logo came out.  20160415BarePCB

I do want to make an adjustment, make the arrows larger, they didn’t even show up on the silkscreen.

PCBLogo

To start testing, I put a jumper in bypassing the lithium cell charger. I then installed the ESP-12E, the SPI RAM, The Crystal, the USB Serial Bridge, the voltage regulator, and the USB connector. Just enough to power up, load a program and test the basics.

20160415assembledPCB

First test was to  connect to PC and run ESPlorer– it worked.

I got a message:


AT-based firmware detected.
AT+GMR
AT version:0.40.0.0(Aug 8 2015 14:45:58)
SDK version:1.3.0
Ai-Thinker Technology Co.,Ltd.
Build:1.3.0.2 Sep 11 2015 11:48:04

I then tried to install my test version of the software and it wouldn’t install.  I went back to ESPlorer and started playing with the DTR and RTS to see what would happen. It turns out I got DTR and RTS backwards. So I cut the traces and added a couple of jumpers. This is the kind of mistake I was hoping to catch in the design review.

It programmed great with the wires swapped. My code crashed, back to a “Hello World” version.

Turns out the internal memory chip installed on the ESP-12E does not run at the settings I had specified with esptool.py.  I found this out by setting it to 20MHz DIO mode which started working. I then switched it to QIO mode to see what happened. QIO worked, next I tried running at 40 MHz. That worked.

../esptool/esptool.py --port /dev/ttyUSB0 --baud 230400 write_flash -ff 40m -fm qio -fs 32m 0x00000 ../bin/eagle.flash.bin 0x40000 ../bin/eagle.irom0text.bin

I enabled HSPI Overlap mode by adding spiRamInit() to the end user_init(). Ran without crashing. When I started building for use, I discovered no SPI Master Read available.  I saw something that looked correct for slave read, so I borrowed a line from it and did a write followed by that line– it built. I uploaded the code, and it ran, still no testing of the SPI Ram.

I added the function calls to write “Hello World” to the SPI RAM. and read back and put out to the console. and I got garbage back to the console.  Not a surprise. Debugging with a logic analyzer next week.

Have you written code for the ESP8266. Have you worked with SPI before? I would love to Hear from you.

 

Electronics design review (Hardware V00D)

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The circuit is almost ready to go to layout again. This week I took a close look at the schematic design to look for errors and unfinished tasks.  By the way, you can put notes on a schematic to help you find anything you put off for later.

I have received the PCBs for my client, but I haven’t had the chance to populate the first one yet.  This means I haven’t had a chance to test the charging circuit yet. The availability of inexpensive PCB fabrication like OSH park has made a mini PCB test run reasonably priced.  You can now design a development board that exactly meets your requirements very inexpensively.  Since each iteration of the this design isn’t costing a lot, I am testing multiple changes each time. This allows me to work with devices that I am completely inexperienced at very low risk.

I started with the lithium cell charging circuit. I verified the input from the micro USB connector is tied to the input of the management chip.  I copied the timing and current limit device values from my client’s design.  The lithium cell (connector) is connected to GND and the dedicated pin on the management chip.  The status outputs are tied to LEDs so I have some indication of what is happening during charging. I may try to incorporate these signals later in the design. The system power output is connected to the 3.3V regulator which is working well on the two test boards I have already built.

Next I looked at the SPI RAM Chip select logic.  The transistor Q6 turns on when CS0 is low; this pulls the chip select line for U2 high preventing U2 from contending with the SPI bus when the flash chip is being accessed.  There is a diode blocking the high from pulling GPIO15 high during reset. There is a pull down resistor for when GPIO15 is low and CS0 is high to activate U2 chip select. This is untested but the design looks like it will work.  I chose 22K resistors for the pulldowns on GPIO15 and U2 chip select as a balance between current required when GPIO15 is high and the speed at which U2 chip select will fall when released.  Since I don’t know the amount of capacitance of that circuit, I may have to change that resistor value later.  Good place to put a note on the schematic.

U2 Schematic notes

The level shifter U3 is untested, I should test it before I go to layout. Another note.

I decided earlier that the voltage booster was working but needs to have an isolated ground on the PCB layout.  I have added an inductor between the boost GND and the system GND.  This allows for some experimentation.  I can just bridge the pads with solder, I can put a resistor in there, or I can install the inductor. If isolating the GND is enough, that’s great.  The resistor would help provide better filtering but could cause problems.  The inductor is best filtering but will slow down signal transitions of the high voltage. I also gave the net name GNDpp to the isolated GND.

Vpp GNDpp isolation

The transistor driver for VPP is untested, because I haven’t had the positive voltage available. I could have attached a 12 volt source and tested it but it’s a simple circuit. It should work. The analog switch is working, nothing to review with it.

Finally, the programming control pins RST and GPIO0. I am not happy with the resistor connections. I have decided to copy the design from the NodeMCU dev board.  It is simple and works well on the dev board.  The only thing I am concerned about here is how much current the UART bridge pulls when not connected to USB.

CH340 Crossslink

Use the GitHub link to get a current copy of this design. After testing, I will go to layout.

I would love to hear any questions or suggestions.  If you would do this differently, please comment.

Debugging

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I got the Sigma Delta putting out a waveform that I was looking for. But when I connected the power rail to the input of the inductor for voltage boost, the system stopped booting correctly.

I had several possible problems to look at.

GPIO16 is tied to reset on some ESP8266 modules allowing wake from deep sleep based on the RTC. I tried taking it back out of the code and I am still getting unexpected boot up activity. Doesn’t appear to be the problem, I may have to come back and have another look.

I haven’t built with the change of memory maps until last week. The bootloader may not be linking properly with my code or I may have made some mistakes pertinent to the linker. I removed the new files and recompiled without GPIO16 support and therefore a smaller memory map that fits without modification of the link files. I commented out most of the code and it still would not boot into my code. Code doesn’t appear to be the problem.

Finally, the boost circuit may draw very large amounts of current that will cause noise back into the rest of the system.  Power may not be stable enough for reliable operation. I disconnected the 5V from the boost circuit and got reliable boot.  I need the boost circuit to work, so I replaced the 10 ohm resistor with a 68 ohm resistor( Maximum current draw from USB would be 5v/68Ohms or 74mA). It wasn’t enough. So I tried 220 Ohms, then I tried 1KOhms.  This means the maximum current I can provide to VPP is significantly reduced.  I will add capacitance to the PCB on the 5V lines to allow for better noise immunity. The board is booting reliably.  The problems I had earlier with the CH340G were probably related to this problem as well.  I still needed to run the CH340G at 3.3V, So I am glad I changed that already.

The boost circuit is not able to create a voltage above 5v with the 1K resistor. Testing the ADC reading, I discovered I had R8 and R9 Cross labelled on the board. So I switched the labels on the layout.

The firmware is running again.  I can put a pulse stream out to the Voltage Boost circuit but the 1K limiting resistor is too large to work correctly.

 

Javascript

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Merry Christmas!

The PCBs came in today, they look great.  Of course I will need to make the modifications I mentioned last week.  I haven’t received the CH340G chips yet. I will wait until I receive them before I start building.

Rev00BPCBs

This week, I wanted to add  a slider to set the Sigma Delta output that drives the voltage booster to the web interface.  I didn’t know javascript at all so, I went to an online tutorial at Codecademy.com. This tutorial is very basic and even explains the basic concepts of programming in general.  I didn’t learn enough to set up a slider, I did learn enough to do some testing.

I quickly got the Sigma Delta output working in GPIO12 by copying the necessary code from the test project I was using. I then added a call to config_sigma_delta() from user_init() in user_main.c.  I also added a call to set_sigma_delta_duty() from my test code in cgi_relay.c.  Of course I added includes to sigma_delta.h in both of those files.  I then changed the Sigma Delta output from GPIO12 to GPIO4 to match the HV_pulse line used to run the switched coil.

Now if I hit the say Hello button, It changes the Sigma Delta output duty cycle. also, the Chart on the index.html page gives the current reading from the ADC once every 5 seconds.

ADCandSDelta

 

Design Review V00B

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Design reviews should be done often, at least just before a new design goes to fabrication.

During testing I had wished for some test pins at the edge of the PCB for verification. I want to add and label test pins for Reset, Txd, Rxd, 3.3V, SCK, MOSI, MISO, IO2, IO3 and L1 pulse.

I added these testpoints to the schematic along with a ground that’s easy to get to. I am putting them into a through hole 1×12 connector. I moved P1 test into the same header. In layout, I’ll place this connector next to the edge where I can get a clip lead connected for testing.

USB to Uart chip completely changed, copied reference design from NodeMCU design. It’s helpful to look at a second design for a sanity check. Everything matches up to an Arduino clone schematic found on the web.  I had left DCD, RI, DSR, and CTS unconnected.  Leaving inputs unconnected can cause problems.  These connections may have internal pullups/pulldowns but I couldn’t find any reference to that in the datasheet. Each of these lines indicates data is ready to flow when held low, I put pulldowns on each of them.

I had changed the SPI connections to correct the mistakes I had made earlier, I have gone back to verify these connections and found conflicting information. I traced the gerber image I had found to get the pinout I currently have. If it’s not correct, I will have the test pins to help me figure out the  correct pinout.

I had replace the port expander with a shift register still using the SPI to fill the register. According to the datasheet, the data shifted in will be latched on the rising edge of the RCLK pin.  If I treat RCLK as a Chip Select Pin on the SPI, a one byte write will set all of the outputs very quickly. This appears that it will work well.

The VPP circuit changes are a big gamble. I don’t know if it will work.  I am adding a 0.1 µF capacitor to the output to reduce output noise.  I am adding a 10 Ohm resistor and a 100 µF capacitor to filter noise from getting back into the rest of the system. I need to isolate the ground of the high voltage circuit to only connect to regular GND Net at only 1 place on the layout. This will help reduce noise transfer back into the rest of the system. The design update is on GitHub, use the link in the upper right hand of the page.

V00BVPPCircuit

Updating Schematic V00B

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In the last few posts, I found several problems with the design as well as found some ways to reduce Bill of Material costs.  I also want to make soldering of the parts easier for a hobbyist.

I had problems using the CH340G chip on my NodeMCU board.  I couldn’t find any references to this problem on the internet.  So I replaced U8 (the CP2104 USB to UART bridge) with the CH340G USB to UART bridge.  I inverted DTR and RTS  and connected them to GPIO0 and RST respectively.  Using transistors as the inverters means that when U8 is not powered, it won’t draw those two lines down.  This is looking forward to when the design is battery powered.

I used the NodeMCU schematic as reference during this part of the design since it is close to what I want to do with this part of the design.

I changed the reset push-button switch to pads on the board and left the upload push-button switch unchanged but don’t plan on installing it unless I run into problems programming the board.

I also want to make things smaller, U9 is a large part of the board.  A shift register can do the same thing and be less expensive. I found the 74HC595 to replace U9. I am still clocking data in using the SPI bus, and then latching it with a pulse from GPIO5.

For the High voltage, I removed the AAT1230 and replaced it with two logic level FETs. One to disable the circuit to drop current draw when in low power mode connected to GPIO14. The other the pulse stream that generates the current through the inductor connected to GPIO4.  This means all the pins on the module are used up again.

Kicad schematic and layout can now be found here. The pcb layout is not current to the schematic, I still need to do a design review before I start the layout.

UProgrammerSchV00B