- Out of the box the two boards were placed together without issue. We provided 12V power and made the necessary connections. We went about following the instructions in the User Guide.
- I flashed the software from the Platform Binaries folder in mmWave studio. I downloaded the latest firmware from the TI website. Power confirmed to be 12V out of a brand new power supply. Using Putty, we were able to connect and watch the boot up process proceed as expected. The ethernet connection settings were configured and seemed to work. FTDI drivers were ok.
- MMWave studio would find the board and startup the GUI
- From there we only had a finite amount of time for each time we would try to step further in the process.
- The first time through we were slow but just about able to run through the GUI steps of selecting the cascade (vs. single chip) and configuring the connection and actually connect. But before being able to start any configuration the linux kernel seemed to go sideways and we lost connection.
- If we try to just press the reset buttons and restart the kernel right away, it would not work. If we waited some amount of time, we could get the kernel to restarts and get back to about that same place, before crashing.
- If we would go off on TI website and search for these symptoms and or try and read some documentation and start again and get just a little bit further each time before the board would freeze and we’d lose connection. If we tried to immediately restart we’d start getting frustrated, sometimes not getting a proper start of the linux kernel. Multiple times I would re-flash the software, wondering if I had corrupted something (while it took time to flash the software with the balena etcher, the board seemed to have enough time to cool off and I would have a little time to work before the next crash.
- We started suspecting a thermal issue and would wait longer in between successive attempts. We’d also try and provide air to the heatsink. This would provide us a little bit of extra time.
- We ended up getting wise and started using the LUA scripts provided instead of the GUI. When using those scripts we were able to Initialize/Configure and Collect however, if we let sit for a little while longer we’d eventually encounter a kernel panic. Roughly after 7 minutes.
- We immediately ordered another board and repeated the same process as above and have had absolutely no issues with this board and have collected many datasets and run scripts repeatedly, left the unit connected for prolonged periods and no problems.
TI is requiring I post this here in order to get a replacement. How did our new board perform perfectly with the same configuration mated to the same RF-EVAL board?
