Gigatron Hackers

Good News!

Pluggy Reloaded is back in stock.
I have sent out a PM to everyone who has expressed interest.

Since I haven't made the price public before:
I am selling the kit for €25 + shipping

For anyone interested, just PM me.

Heads up for those ordering one: The assembly requires some light desoldering as the Micro SD breakout comes pre-soldered with an incorrect header.

Mine arrived just before Christmas and I had it up and running pretty quickly, here's a video of it in action.

https://streamable.com/d7nbn

Apologies for the shaky cam, but my phones' cameras have crapped themselves and the tablet's motion camera is so much clearer than it's still camera :/

Very nice! Thanks for sharing!

Got mine in the mail today.
Soldering was straightforward. Programmed it and it worked!
I tried 2 SD cards, a Sandisk and Philips one, but the console did not show any files on there.

Awesome! That went surprisingly fast!
Regarding the SD card: Make sure the card is formatted with either FAT16 or FAT32.
exFAT or anything else doesn't work via the SPI interface.
Also make sure all the files are located in the root folder.
If that doesn't fix the issue, contact me and I'll see what I can do.

It was FAT32 formmatted with a GT1 file in the root.

After a bit of searching around, it now suddenly works. There's nothing I deliberately changed.. so it's a guess why it now works. Maybe it was just a bad connection with the SD card?

So the SanDisk Utra 16GB from AliExpress is working.

EDIT: it appears to be working sometimes, sometimes not. Sometimes, resetting the ATtiny board helps.

walter wrote: ↑26 Jan 2020, 13:31 Maybe it was just a bad connection with the SD card?

That or a cold solder joint would be my guess as well, but I assume you have checked that already.
I used to experience some stack overflow issues on the ProMicro where some features, including the SD card stopped working randomly, due to static/global variables being overwritten by the stack, but that should not happen anymore with the current Software.

I find I reset the ProMicro quite often where it seems to hang. The original BabelFish has an escape mechanism against hanging in case of a communication error. I found that this isn't present in the Reloaded version, as this got written in a different way. This may be a factor as well. (That is also the reason I haven't been able to merge the changes back into the main version yet: I haven't had time to sort it out.)

Thanks for the info. I'll look into it

walter wrote: ↑26 Jan 2020, 13:31 It was FAT32 formmatted with a GT1 file in the root.

After a bit of searching around, it now suddenly works. There's nothing I deliberately changed.. so it's a guess why it now works. Maybe it was just a bad connection with the SD card?

So the SanDisk Utra 16GB from AliExpress is working.

EDIT: it appears to be working sometimes, sometimes not. Sometimes, resetting the ATtiny board helps.

I have a couple of a SanDisk Ultra's 16GB lying around as well, but I have never gotten them to work. Within a terminal application talking to the Gigatron I always just receive an empty 'Files:' from the revised 'BabelFish.ino' and CardTest.gcl always crashes at ReadMBR; (this is with a Fat32 formatted one gt1 file in Root scenario).

Curiously CardTest.gcl gets glitchy as it is printing, (random pixels on the screen), as if some sort of buffer overflow is happening within a loop, (I haven't had time to look at the code yet).

Resets, reseated, checked for shorts/dry joints, etc etc, didn't help; the rest of the board works perfectly apart from the random timeout that Marcel mentioned, (using a terminal program to print BabelFish's help menu seems to re-sync the two).