Has anyone got the new EB006V9 to work yet?

[bobingabout]

It's been nearly 2 months now since a delivery man handed me my new EB006-00-9 (EB006v9) EBlocks programmer board, and dispite the support efforts of Benj and DavidA, I'm still unable to use it.

I was wondering if anyone else has had a better experience with it so far?

In all fairness, you can expect some bumps in the road, and bugs with a new product, but 2 months down the line without a solution is getting a bit frustrating.

The lecturers here are actually starting to consider moving away from PICs entirely for alternate products like the Raspberry Pi, or MBed, simply because I havn't got the new PIC programmer to work yet.

[Benj]

Hello,

Sorry to hear your still having problems with the board. As far as I know we have sold quite a lot of them now and most seem to be ok but a few do seem to be causing problems. We have moved to the new Windows USB driver mechanism WINUSB to gain a bit of bandwidth and it looks like it is this which is causing most of the problems.

Do you have a single board or a quantity of boards? If it's just a single board then do you want to return it to us and we will do some testing and see if we can find a problem with it here?

Let me know and I will arrange a returns form for you to fill out and send back with the board.

I'm assuming that the lecturers have never actually used a raspberry pi, they are tricky little beasts but fairly good if you know what your doing Linux wise.

[bobingabout]

We currently only have the 1, it was something I ordered in to try and get it set up on our system, before buying the whole batch, which has been put off, due to budgetting...

Anyway, it's hard to tell if it's a problem with the device, or the software, because the device is detected, and drivers installed, but the main errors I'm getting from MLoader are as follows:

Unknown chip type in data file
On board chip does not match the given chip

And the readout always says

File sending!
File sent with 1 warnings:
1: Flash memory not verified - may be due to code protect

code protection is off, and the chip apears to have been blanked.

I don't mind sending in the EB006 at all, but if other people arn't having a problem with it, I want a copy of the version of the software they're using, so I can try it. The latest stuff on your download page is what I'm having problems with.

[petesmart]

I have just received my EB006 v9 this evening and could not get it to work out of the box.

I am running Windows 7

After some time I have managed to get the unit running and here's what I did:

• plugging the device to a USB port and watch the win USB driver load successfully
  I then went into device manager and it was registered as a "universal USB device"
  Right click "the properties section and clicked update driver
  then proceeded to update the driver by selecting the latest EB 006 driver that I had downloaded off the web previously http://www.matrixmultimedia.com/resourc ... e.php?id=6
  after doing this procedure the device registered in the device manager as a custom USB device

From this point on the EB 006V9 began to work! - compiled a 1 sec flasher from FCv6 to the chip

Having got the EB 006V9 working I then tried in mloader directly with a hex file, with results below.

Code: Select all

File loaded from...
=> 1secflash.hex
File sending!
File sent with 1 warnings:
  1: Flash memory not verified - may be due to code protect

Whilst the file loaded successfully and the one sec flasher ran it did come up with the flash memory not verified – I checked and code-protect is turned off!

My observation is that the V9 firmware is not mature as I observed a number of odd behaviours during my testing

• - could not get the ICD running in normal speed simulation mode to stop at breakpoints
  - some of the time ICD would not run at normal play speed
  - every time I reloaded code into the chip after making an amendment to the chart, Mloader appeared to throw up an error saying it could not recognise the chip (this is within flowcode 6) - had to power off/power on the EB 006 board and then reload
  - attempted to run at a lower simulation speed – basically nothing happened. Could not stop the simulation, the stop button for simulation was greyed out, however flow code was still in simulation mode.
  - Loaded a 8 LED counter – simulated fine in flowcode however in ICD mode would only get to LED 6 and freeze, the only way out was to powerdown the EB 006 board and repower

In summary, EB 006v9 appears to work in normal programming mode when you get the driver sorted however it is basically unusable in ICD mode.

BenR@matrix - I'm happy to provide more feedback – I have not logged any bug reports as this may already be known, I have not had a chance to check the forum or bug list

[Benj]

Cheers for the info Pete,

I'll look into the ICD issues for you.

Regarding the not verified messages are you running the latest 6.0.7 release?

I have just updated the v9 EB006 Driver download in the resource section so that it has installation instructions to help users to get up and running with the hardware.

http://www.matrixmultimedia.com/product ... od=EB006V9

Direct link to new file: http://www.matrixmultimedia.com/resourc ... php?id=744

[medelec35]

I have just completed a fresh 64bit Windows 7 and using drivers from link posted on the above post.
One tip is when installing drivers and using browse option, always stay at the root directory of EB006V9 drivers,

My findings are:
With 16F1937 using Flowcode V6, file is sent to programmer with no issues with jumper on PSU (9V) or USB.
After trying with ICD (could just be a coincidence) but unable to get 16F1937 to program again.
With the mLoader that is shipped with V6.0.7 I just get:

mloader error.png

(58.05 KiB) Downloaded 6091 times

After replaing mLoader with files from above link I just get:

mloader error from link.png

(48.11 KiB) Downloaded 6091 times

With Flowcode V5.5.2.1 I always get:

FC5.png

(16.25 KiB) Downloaded 6097 times

(before I got the issue woth V6)

Has the new drivers for EB006V9 been testing with Flowcode V5?

Edit:
Got V6 sending to chip again without any issues by just unplugging from one usb socket to another.
Not part of a hub, just two that are directly next to each other.

With mLoader working that is shipped with V6.0.7 ,if replaced with mLoader that the link above points to the I get the following error:

mloader error 3.png

(35.79 KiB) Downloaded 6077 times

[Benj]

Hi Martin,

Thanks for the comments.

The mLoader release available from here: http://www.matrixmultimedia.com/resourc ... .php?id=12 was out of date so I have brought the files up to date now to match the v6 release.

For using the EB006 v9 board with Flowcode v5 please refer to this FAQ topic: http://www.matrixmultimedia.com/support ... ?f=2&t=808

Let me know how you get on.

[petesmart]

Thanks Ben,

Martin's experience was very similar to mine with Mloader. Will load up the new version and come back to you....is there a specific version no to check against?

Best

Pete

[medelec35]

Hi Ben/Pete,

Thanks for the reply Ben.
With the updated links all is now working.

As for flowcode V5 I did give up before looking at Q & A since after forums being down, then trying to search for on forum for answers yesterday and just getting a SQL error, I just got frustrated & gave up.

After your post above, following Q & A for Flowcode V4 &V5:
I found instructions very straight forward and easy to follow.
I am able to program EB006 V9 from flowcode V4, V5 and V6 with no issues at all.

Lesson learned> follow Q & A before searching

[bobingabout]

Since I don't own flowcode, I have only been testing things in mLoader. Fairly sure my issues are due to mLoader having a few wrinkles to iron out.

As also stated though, I'm not allowed to buy anything untill August, so... we have that long to get things working before the descission to buy EBlocks is made.

If we do go with EBlocks though, the lecturers who teach PICs have already shown an interest in Flowcode, so we might end up buying a whole package.

They've already got me looking at how to connect our old "Expansion boards" to an EBlocks programmer.

Also, I think David needs to have a look at the function FindChipFromID on line 291 of file ParseCsvFile.cpp, mLoader complains about that almost every time for me, with every chip I've tried.