How bad did I mess up?


 
A

Andy Williams

New member
First, thanks everyone for this awesome project! I've been looking forward to building the heatermeter/raspberry pi for a long time now.

So I followed the build instructions with some small changes as I have a case in mind to house everything. My plan was to use an old floppy drive cable I had laying around to connect the heatermeter to the pi. I just realized for me to do this, that I needed to solder the header on the opposite side of the directions -- basically the side with "HeaterMeter v4.0".

My problem is that before I realized this, I had connected the pi to the heatermeter and powered up via the pi. Several times....

Is my heatermeter now shot? If not, then I'll go through the process of removing the header and soldering it on the opposite side it currently sits.


Thanks!

Andy
 
I've plugged my LCD cable in backwards a dozen times now without causing any damage. Also, the side with the "HeaterMeter v4.0" is the side you're supposed to solder them on. Finally, note this image from the build instructions-- floppy drive cable!

I cut the everything off past the first connector. I know some of the lines are flipped along the way and if I remember correctly it didn't work at all in the "Drive B" plug.
 
Hi Bryan, thanks for the response.

Unfortunately, I'm not talking about the LCD; I am talking about the GPIO connector between the heatermeter and the Raspberry Pi
 
If you were powering up via the micro-usb port on the rPi, I'm guessing you're probably OK, especially if you can still get the rPi to boot up.
 
A picture is worth a thousand words. Maybe a pic of your configuration (without power of course) would help. :)

I doubt you really messed anything up - the 328P is pretty rugged, especially when you consider that the pi is only applying 3.3V or 5V to any of the GPIO pins. And those voltages are what the 328P uses anyway.

Worst case scenario (highly improbable) - you buy another 328P.
 
I am wondering why you don't just mate the rPi to the HM board in the standard piggyback configuration?

And don't floppy drive cables have some wires flipped in the ribbon? If I recall correctly, I think you should be able to see a section of the ribbon that is inverted on one end before it enters the connector? If so, that would cross up the wiring to the rPi, not sure how many pins are used for the connection to the HM and/or if the inverted section of the ribbon would cause an issue?
 
Andy Williams said:
Unfortunately, I'm not talking about the LCD; I am talking about the GPIO connector between the heatermeter and the Raspberry Pi
Click to expand...
emot-stare.gif


Golly. Well I will say that very few of the pins are actually connected in that header. If your Pi still boots, then that's 99% of what can go wrong. I think the HeaterMeter board is pretty resilient with respect to getting hooked up wrong. All the parts are 5V tolerant or more and that's all the Pi puts out.

If you hooked up 12V to the HeateMeter I'm sure you're going to have a dead Pi though.
 
Quick update -- looks like I had multiple problems which ended up being a good thing.

I did yank out the GPIO header, flipped it to the other side and voila! Everything powered on, the Pi recognized the board, everything flashed and looks good.

The other problem is that I wasn't paying attention at Radio Shack and didn't pick the correct 12v adapter plug for the wall wart.... good thing though, otherwise I would have fried the pi.

Figured out I also have some wires criss-crossed on the LCD which I'll fix. Overall, not to bad considering this was my first board/project like this.

Ralph -- I wanted to use a case where I could easily take out my Pi and use it for other things when not cooking. That's why I wanted to use a ribbon cable to make that part easy. You are also correct -- some floppy cables that can connect two drives does indeed have a flip on some of the pins. Easy enough to fix by taking apart the cable and flipping them back.

Thanks again everyone!
 
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