Bricked my Rotary Trinkey Moderators: adafruit_support_bill, adafruit

[ihab]

Hi folks,

I bought a Rotary Trinkey (https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-rotary-trinkey) and tried to program it with the Arduino IDE, following the instructions that tell us to install the Sparkfun and then Adafruit SAMD board support. The board was recognized correctly, and I tried to push the "Blink" tutorial code. This seemed successful, but nothing blinked -- and from that point on, the board seems bricked. It does not show up either as a USB device or a serial terminal. I have verified this behavior plugging it into two separate Ubuntu Linux hosts.

How do I un-brick this board, if that's indeed what I managed to do?

Ihab

[ihab]

Ok, with trial and error I figured out I could un-brick the board and get back my `/dev/ttyACM0` serial device by double-clicking the "reset" button. This one is totally on me -- the procedure is described at https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-rot ... ey/pinouts. :)

However, after pushing the "Blink" tutorial, `/dev/ttyACM0` still disappears, requiring a board reset per the above.

Further, the Arduino sketch at the bottom of the page https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-rot ... cuitpython implies there is a simple monochrome LED at pin `13`, but it seems that's not the case for the Rotary Trinkey.

Ihab

[ihab]

[ Sorry to keep replying to myself. ]

The problem with losing `/dev/ttyACM0` seems to go away when I write to some pin other than `13`. But now, when I push the following Arduino sketch, nothing happens -- the Neopixel LED does not blink.

Code: Select all | TOGGLE FULL SIZE

void setup() {
  pinMode(PIN_NEOPIXEL, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
  digitalWrite(PIN_NEOPIXEL, HIGH);
  delay(250);
  digitalWrite(PIN_NEOPIXEL, LOW);
  delay(250);
}


[ihab]

However, this program works just fine and writes visible output to `/dev/ttyACM0`; the issue is therefore limited to blinking the LED, which is not a big blocker for me:

Code: Select all | TOGGLE FULL SIZE

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(115200);
}

void loop() {
  Serial.println("hello");
  delay(500);
}


[ihab]

The trick ended up being to use CircuitPython, and eschew the plain Arduino sketches for now.

Using CircuitPython, I am able to successfully control the LED, and I got the https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-rot ... play-pause example working.

One note about "volume-play-pause" -- it seems like I get spurious key repeats for the button-press events. I have my encoder connected via 5 short wires rather than soldered directly in, so I cannot rule out some sort of electrical interference. I have not looked into this systematically yet.

Ihab