Chronos, Europe, Serbia

Hi Nikola,

                     Yes it is true. However i wish to tell you, that i bought a TI Chrono as well, and it's RF access point does not seem to work. The TI Tech support has not been able to help at all. They do not respond to queries.

It would be a nice product, if TI provides support and if it works.

Regards

Shobhit

We had a case where the AP was delivered with a different frequency than the watch, which of course didn't work. Whiel the watch can be changed to match the AP frequency, changing the firmware of the AP is more difficult, as it is not MSP based.

However, the watch is much fun. And even if you do not use the RF features at all, there's a lot of fun in it.

Michael,

                   The AP is not detected by the TI CCC. I read there were issues with it, and i tried to resolve them with the solutions proposed by other members. It still did not work for me.

 

Regards

Shobhit

Well, USB stands for 'unbelievable silly bus' :)
However, the USB typically is a USB-to-serial bridge, providing a virtual COM port on the PC side. At least it is for the FETs and the LaunchPad, and I htink it is for the AP too.

So any aplicaiton that might look for serial devices might interfere with the AP communication.

If you have an app lurking in the background that communicates with an attached smartphone, it may hijack the virtual com port, thinking there is a smartphone docking on. Then the TI application will not be able to detect the AP on any (free) COM port.

From the LaunchPad threads there is the following test:

open the device manager.
check for a virtual com port and not its COM number.

Open HyperTerm and try to open the COM port. If HyperTerm is telling you the port is in use, then someone is hijacking it.
Else you should be able to communicate with the AP (that doesn't mean that it will understand you or you will understand any reply :) )

Yes, it is a virtual com port. The launchpad works just fine on the same notebook. No, i do not believe any other application is accessing the same port. I could try the hyperterminal, but i do not think it will do any good. 

 

Regards

Shobhit

The AP cannot be detected by Code Composer as it uses a CC1111 part which has an 8051 micro controller in it, not an MSP430.  Thus to program it you will need to use the CCDebugger and have an appropriate 8051 compatible compiler such as the IAR compiler.

Jim Noxon

Jim,

           I am not trying to reprogram the AP. I do not have a CC Debugger as well. The real issue is that i cannot get it to work with TI CCC running on Windows Vista 32 bit. 

This is the link for my post. http://e2e.ti.com/support/microcontrollers/msp43016-bit_ultra-low_power_mcus/f/166/p/104852/368985.aspx#368985

and over here http://e2e.ti.com/support/microcontrollers/msp43016-bit_ultra-low_power_mcus/f/166/p/31051/374371.aspx#374371

I have tried all the options, including uninstalling and reinstalling the software,drivers. Used a different system running XP SP2, and it still did not work.

 

Regards

Shobhit

When you say the TI CCC, are you referring to the code composer compiler?  Or is this something else?

Jim Noxon

Never mind, so the CCC is the chronos control center, right?

Do you see the USB device in the device manager control panel?

Jim Noxon

Yes it meant the control centre. The driver installs just fine, and it shows in the device manager. I have already checked the baud rate settings. The VID/PID are same as in the inf file present in the drivers directory. I have changed the location of USBSER serivces to windows\System32\drivers and then re installed the driver using DPINST utility in the EZ430 driver directory. I have a launchpad kit and EZ430 F2013 as well and they work with the same notebook.

Nothing seems to works

 

Regards

Shobhit

So is the error that the access point is off or is the error that it cannot be found?

Jim Noxon

The TI Control Centre is not able to detect the Access Point. The driver installs fine, and it shows up in the device manager. However the TI Control Centre says no Access Point Detected. Clicking on the Start Access Point does not help either. I have downloaded the latest Control Centre Software, and it still did not work. I have tried running it on a XP machine but no luck

 

Regards

Shobhit

Shobhit Kukreti said:

The driver installs fine, and it shows up in the device manager. However the TI Control Centre says no Access Point Detected

That's what I was talking about. Which Com port does the AP appear on? Sometimes, ti is a very high number (especially if you used different USB sockets or different devices with virtual COM port in the past).
It's possible that CCC can only access it if the COM port has a lower number. You can manually change it in the device manager -> device preferences.

Are you able to open this virtual COM port in HyperTerm or Putty? Or does it say 'in use'? If so, then another pplication has opened the COM port and CCC is unable to open it and therefore cannot find the AP.

What is the exact name the virtual COM port appears under? Maybe there's something wrong and an older driver was used for the virtual COM port. (yes, drivers can hijack sub-devices too). If so, you'll have to manually select the correct driver for the virtual COM port. Just re-installing won't help as long the other driver still grabs the virtual hardware first.

Michael, this port will appear only when the AP is plugged in. I am able to connect with it via hyperterminal, although AT commands did not work or rather shouldn't be working.

I have installed the driver manually. The name of virtual com port is " TI C1111 Low Power RF to USB CDC Serial Port". It is on COM4.

 

Regards

Shobhit

Shobhit,

first of all, on behalf of the MSP430 team I apologize for not getting to support your issue any sooner. It's pretty common for some of our folks to filter out posts by Verified/Unanswered Status of the threads, and sometimes we miss follow-up questions when going back & check on the previously answered ones. Fortunately there are other active members who chimed in and helped out in the mean time.

You mentioned that your first PC is a Windows Vista 32-bit system. We unfortunately do not have Vista systems readily available to test with the Chronos, but I believe it was tested at some point during development. I can however confirm that the USB stick works with Windows 7 32-bit on my home machine. You also mentioned that it also fails on your Windows XP SP2 system. This is a tried & trued system for the Chronos, so that makes me tend to think [hopefully] this is not an OS-specific issue.

For both cases, I'm sure you have done this already, but please check that no other USB/UART devices are connected (i.e. no other virtual COM port that might create a conflict for the CCC selection)

Your next debug attempt with hyper terminal is a step in the right direction, however, the UART protocol requires some hand-shaking before real communication can take place [such as command to turn on the AP, command to send/receive data, etc.] Our community has generated several simplified GUIs/SW to emulate the CCC's communication to the USB AP. I'd suggest trying out  these simple processing GUIs: accelerometer graph or get button press or others listed on the eZ430-Chronos wiki. Hopefully this can verify whether a UART connection can be established between the PC & the USB stick.

!!Notice that when first connected to the PC, the USB stick's LED does light up briefly, and then turns off. It will not turn on again until the PC issues the UART command(s) to turn on the RF Access Point.

Please give this a try and update us with the outcome. In the meanwhile, I will check with the team on any known issues with the 433MHz version of the USB stick, or on Vista platform.

Thank you for your patience!

Regards,

Dung

 

Hi Dung, yes it has been a while since my question was answered.  My thread is over here http://e2e.ti.com/support/microcontrollers/msp43016-bit_ultra-low_power_mcus/f/166/p/31051/378891.aspx#378891

 

I will try the things you have suggested. However i am not sure how to run the python script. I do not have any other USB/UART device connected. 

 

Regards

Shobhit

Shobhit,

I would suggest trying the processing ones. One of them might even come with an already-built executable. The processing download (if necessary) is also pretty small and works right out of the box.

Regards,

Dung

Hi Dung, 

                 The good news is the AP works. Bad news is , it does not work with TI Control Centre. I got it working with this program. http://www.tupperbot.com/?p=105. Was able to open the COM Port, communicate with the watch, and send button presses and accelerometer data. 

 

So there is a start . I would still like it to work with TI CCC

 

Regards

Shobhit

Hi Shobhit,

Nice talking with you yesterday during the Digi-Key Virtual Conference. 

As promised I asked our expert and her recommendation is to check that you are using the correct mode.  The Chronos has two modes.  One for the control centre which is SimplciTI based and the other mode uses the new Blue Robin sports protocol.  The two protocols are not compatible.

She also reminded that everything is already posted on the wiki and this is the best source for infromation.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Shawn

 

Hi Shawn,

                      I have gone through the TI Chrono Wiki. It did not help in my case. The hardware is ok, because i got it to work with a .NET program. The Control Centre does not detect Access Point. I am using the SimplciTI mode. It could be a driver issue. The virtual com port is not being accessed by any other program.

The major issue is, that the watch is a little fragile. The clasp holding the push buttons come ff very easily, and i wanted to try rf bsl, so that i do not need to disassemble the watch again and again

 

Regards

Shobhit