Category Archives: troubleshooting

Steve Collins: When Things Go Wrong In Space

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[Steve Collins] is a regular around Hackaday. He’s brought homebrew LIDARs to our regular meetups, he’s given a talk on a lifetime’s worth of hacking, and he is the owner of the most immaculate Hackaday t-shirt we’ve ever seen.

For the 2016 Hackaday SuperConference,  [Steve] took a break from his day job of driving spacecraft around the Solar System. As you can imagine, NASA plans on things going wrong. How do you plan for that? [Steve] answers all your questions by telling you what happens when things go wrong in space.

Space is the worst possible place for hardware. Not …read more

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Navigation Thing: Four Days, Three Problems, and Fake Piezos

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The “Navigation Thing“ was designed and built by [Jan Mrázek] as part of a night game activity for high school students during week-long seminar. A night-time path through a forest had stations with simple tasks, and the Navigation Thing used GPS, digital compass, a beeper, and a ring of RGB LEDs to provide a bit of “Wow factor” while guiding a group of students from one station to the next. The devices had a clear design direction:

“I wanted to build a device which a participant would find, insert batteries, and follow the beeping to find the next stop. Imagine

…read more

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Troubleshooting Azure ARM Virtual Machines

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Aidan walks through how to use the built-in tools for troubleshooting faulty virtual machines in Azure: diagnose tools, activity logs, resource health, boot diagnostics, reset password, redeploy, and support request.

The post Troubleshooting Azure ARM Virtual Machines appeared first on Petri.

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What Could Go Wrong? I2C Edition

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I should really like I2C more than I do. In principle, it’s a brilliant protocol, and in comparison to asynchronous serial and SPI, it’s very well defined and clearly standardized. On paper, up to 127 devices can be connected together using just two wires (and ground). There’s an allowance for multiple clock-masters on the same bus, and a way for slaves to signal that the master to wait. It sounds perfect.

In reality, the tradeoff for using only two wires is a significantly complicated signalling and addressing system that brings both pitfalls and opportunities for debugging. Although I2C does reduce …read more

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What Could Go Wrong: SPI

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Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) is not really a protocol, but more of a general idea. It’s the bare-minimum way to transfer a lot of data between two chips as quickly as possible, and for that reason alone, it’s one of my favorites. But that doesn’t mean that everything is hugs and daffodils. Even despite SPI’s simplicity, there are still a few ways that things can go wrong.

In the previous article in this series, inspired by actual reader questions, I looked into troubleshooting asynchronous serial connections. Now that you’ve got that working, it’s time to step up to debugging your …read more

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What Could Go Wrong: Asynchronous Serial Edition

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It’s the easiest thing in the world — simple, straightforward serial data. It’s the fallback communication protocol for nearly every embedded system out there, and so it’s one that you really want to work when the chips are down. And yet! When you need it most, you may discover that even asynchronous serial can cost you a few hours of debugging time and add a few gray hairs to your scalp.

In this article, I’m going to cover most (all?) of the things that can go wrong with asynchronous serial protocols, and how to diagnose and debug this most useful …read more

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