We had a student working for us over the summer, and he was trying to interface an ADS1216 to a microcontroller board. He got some simpler SPI devices to communicate reliably with the microcontroller, but had problems getting the ADS1216 to return a valid stream of data.
In an effort to first get a setup working reliably we looked at the DEM-ADS1216 evaluation board, but found it difficult to get hold of (it seems to have been discontinued). With the documentation for it, I built what is essentially a clone of the circuit, with a few minor exceptions such as an external clock source, rather than on-board crystal.
Using the DEM-ADS1216's software, success was indifferent. With one PC, the software refused to see the board at all, with a second machine the software largely worked, but there were some anomalies. Sometimes the software refused to see the ADS1216, but on a second try found it OK. When trying to read data from the device, it seemed to work sometimes, but had an awful lot of what were clearly bad data values, even when the value going into the ADC was a constant DC value, or low frequency square or sine wave.
Does anyone know if the DEM-ADS1216 is partcicularly sensitive to the parallel printer interface of the PC connected to it, or whether the SPI interface is more fussy than simpler SPI interfaces on less demanding devices?
