Trouble with brand new Snickerdoodle black

[Christopher Johnson]

Today I received my new Snickerdoodle black hardware, but I've been having trouble getting it to work.  I installed the micro-SD card purchased from CrowdSupply with the Ubuntu 16.04 OS image.  I installed the STM USB drivers for Windows 7 64-bit and set up puTTy for serial access on that COM port.  I connected a USB data cable (not power-only) and saw the green "power" LED light up, and saw the STM USB COM port show up in Windows Device Manager.  I started putty, set the baud rate to 115.2K (8/1/N) and expected to see the Linux boot screen, but unfortunately I saw nothing.  The green "power" (and USB) LED flickers if I hit ENTER in putty, but other than that, no signs of life.  I saw a YouTube video that showed a snickerdoodle with a white LED pulsing a heartbeat when it booted, but mine does not show that heartbeat.

Here are some things I checked:
  - Firmware on micro-SD is labeled "snickerdoodle black /03 /04  Ubuntu 16.04", which matches my hardware.
  - Contacts on micro-SD socket are not bent and line up with the contacts on the SD card.  The SD socket is locked closed.
  - I also tried the Tera Term and SecureCRT terminal emulators, but with no luck.
  - I tried a second USB cable that I knew to be a good data (not power-only) cable.
  - I tried booting with the USB cable plugged into a power adapter rather than the Windows PC to make sure it wasn't a power issue.
  - I don't have a Linux box to test-mount the SD card, but on a Windows box, it was unmountable, indicating it's no longer a Windows filesystem on the card.
  - I tried connecting via Bluetooth, but when my phone scanned for devices, the snickerdoodle did not show up.

I hate the jump the gun and say that I got a bad board, but I'm running out of things to try.  Does anyone have any ideas on how to get my new snickerdoodle black working?

If it turns out that I did get a bad board, would I contact Crowd Supply or krtkl directly to get an RMA number?

Thank you for any help you can give me.

Best Regards,
   Christopher Johnson

[weath...@krtkl.com]

Hi Christopher,

Can you possibly post a photo of the top and bottom of the board so we can positively identify your hardware?

-Jamil

[Christopher Johnson]

Here you go.  If you can't tell from these photos, let me know and I'll try adding them as attachments instead of embedding them as photos.

  - Chris

[weath...@krtkl.com]

Thanks Chris, I just wanted to make sure I was aligned on the hardware version / serial number.

Can you try one other thing for me just to eliminate the variety of potential windows driver/terminal issues?

For a moment don't worry about the USB serial terminal.  Just insert the microSD card and plug into a USB port or charger that can supply at least 1A (I am testing with a power pack  I have for instance).   Wait about a minute and see if you can see a WiFi network named snickerdoodle-XXXXXX visible.

See my photos below:

[Christopher Johnson]

I used a USB power adapter rated at 2A output (from an Android tablet) and let the Snickerdoodle boot for about 5 minutes.  I checked with two different laptops but did not see a WiFi hotspot from the Snickerdoodle.

    - Chris

[Bush]

This sounds like an issue with your SD card. If the board is recognizing your key presses but there is no output, the system has likely failed to boot. If you do not see a FAT file system in Windows when you connect the SD card then the card may have become corrupted somehow. Keep in mind that the Linux filesystem on the SD card is not read/writable from a Windows system so if you are prompted to "initialize" or "repair" the card when connecting it to a Windows system, always cancel. You should see a 128MB FAT filesystem labeled "BOOT" when you connect to Windows. If you do not, you should re-image the SD card which can be done using the images located here: http://krtkl.com/downloads

You can use the built in card formatting utility to initialize the card for a re-imaging or you can use the formatter located here: https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

If you are using Windows, you will need to download a utility for loading the image onto the card: https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/

 https://github.com/krtkl/snickerdoodle-manual/blob/master/snickerdoodle-SDCard/snickerdoodle-SDCard.pdf

After you image the card, Windows should auto-mount the read/writable partition (BOOT) and you can verify that the card was successfully written before attempting to boot your snickerdoodle with the SD card. Then we can determine if the issue is possibly the board, card or some other issue.

[Christopher Johnson]

You were exactly right!  I took a closer look at the SD card, which I purchased pre-imaged from CrowdSupply, and it had only a single 5.7 GB partition (with no filesystem type specified).  I tried to reformat it but the SD formatter threw an error (BTW, they are up to SD Formatter Version 5 now, and it does not allow you to enable "format size adjustment" anymore).  There appears to be something wrong with the micro SD card itself.  I'll contact Crowd Supply about swapping it out for a good one.

I took a known-good micro-SD card that I was using in a Raspberry Pi 3, reformatted it and put the "snickerdoodle_black_xenial_kinetic" image on it.  This time the Windows PC saw three FAT partitions.

I put the newly-imaged card in the snickerdoodle and it booted right into Linux.  It still did not show the white LED heartbeat during boot, so I guess that YouTube video I saw must have had a different firmware version.  But I'm a happy camper now.

Thank you to everyone who helped me out with this problem!

  - Chris