raven woes

Yes, we have experienced Ravens dying. We have four or five. One is dead. Another is intermittent. They all worked fine originally. We got no response from Macriagor on this issue (they've been helpful on other issues though).

No, we have not had luck reviving them. I was suspicious that the DB25 parallel port connector was intermittent. We replaced that connector on our dead Raven and that seemed to help, but it was short lived because now it seems dead again. We haven't experimented further because we have the others that are working.

If you discover a fix, please share it.

-- Kevin

encouraged by your (albeit shortlived) success, I resoldered all through hole connections on the PCB, and gave the entire board a good cleaning with 'flux-off' ... and low and behold - it works again ! but for how long ? time will tell.

I have a somewhat similar experience to what you describe. The raven that i use works "partly", i.e., i can connect to my target using GDB/Insight on cygwin on Windows, but the "Host" and "Target" LED's on the Raven box remain off. Only the power LED is on.

I have tried getting the host software working on Linux (using Macraigor's proprietary kernel modules and GDB server stub. Also, i've been playing around with IAR System's C-Spy debugger. In both cases, the debuggers complain that "the cable is disconnected". This does not appear to be (solely) a hardware failure, as i have GDB/Insight working with the Raven on the same development host, as described above.

Nevertheless, i wonder whether the software trouble can be caused by an unstable Raven.

Regards,

--Tue

I have also banged my head on this problem - in the end I had to have two hosts : one with Windows 2K/cygwin running the Macraigor "ArmlibRemote" module (with the RAVEN on its parallel port) - then I would connect from GDB via TCP from my Linux host

just a stupid thought : I have also found that when the raven starts "misbehaving" it often helps to reduce the OCD speed - you may find that your GDB/Insight connection uses a slow OCD speed (say 8) and the other two environments (C-Spy & Linux) are connecting too fast ...

Not at all stupid, that's what IAR systems mentions on their support pages as well:

"Sometimes Raven does not work well with C-SPY, even though it works with the OCD debugger. This is usually an indication that Raven works under light load, but are having trouble handling heavy load. C-SPY causes massive traffic during startup and normally stresses Raven more than the OCD debugger. A fast host computer will cause heavier traffic, thereby increasing the risk of communication problems. To simulate heavy load with the OCD debugger, try the following command: sf 1 4 0 which means read 32-bit values starting at address 0 forever. This usually causes the OCD debugger to fail with Raven when C-SPY is having trouble."

Surfing on Macraigor's site today, i discovered a small tool to test the connectivity to a RAVEN, attached to the parallel port. It's available on

I tried the test tool, on several different development hosts, but couldn't get any other results than "EPP mode parallel port not found" (after ensuring that the BIOS settings for the parallel port was indeed "EPP mode"). This brings me closer to the conclusion that the Raven in question is dead.

If anyone has experiences with the test tool mentioned above, please let me know!

--Tue