I received my Bus Pirate yesterday only to discover that it wouldn't connect. The serial port popped up, but no data seemed to be flowing. I even tried connecting to the Bus Pirate via the PIC programmer, to no avail.
Frustrated, I set about trying to After some probing, I came to the conclusion that a connection between the FTDI and the PIC was bad. On a hunch, I decided to try and reflow the board. After a very nervous 20 minutes, I plugged in my Bus Pirate. The serial port once again showed up. At least I didn't destroy it completely.
After seeing this, I fired up the programmer and proceeded to reflash the firmware. Success!
Everything seems to be in order now. I've successfully updated the firmware and have been able to connect and use the device successfully.
Thought you might like to know.
Thanks for the report. I'm sorry it didn't work.
It's strange that the PIC wouldn't even connect to the programmer. Did you see how it had failed? Seeed did two tests on each unit before it left the factory, it's worrying if the minor stress of shipping is breaking a lot of connections.
From what I could tell, there simply wasn't any connection between the FTDI chip and the PIC.
IMO, the packaging by Seeed was not up to the job. It was shipped in a flimsy padded envelope, and the thickness of the board padding foam bulged quite a bit. It wouldn't take very much at all to cause any stress/damage to the PCB at all.
But like I said earlier, everything seems to be working now. Love this little board!
We are really uncomfortalbe to learn this. Is there visible damage to the board? How is the envelop look like when you receive it?
The package is like previous batch, we didn't see similar issue by then. Sorry for the inconvenience brought!
I wonder if placing the board in a small plastic box (with just enough foam inside to keep it from sloshing around) inside of the padded envelope would be better. Not clear how the box and the envelope would interact during travel though.
Regardless, this concerns me, as someone who's interested in a v3. My sourdough bread isn't excited by the prospect of sharing the toaster oven with any inorganic interlopers.