Hi,
I’ve been trying to get the core module working, but things have not gone according to plan. The problems started when I first tried installing MIOS onto the PIC (which I bought from Mike). I’m on Linux (Ubuntu 10.04) and I’m using a USB-MIDI cable with the upload.
When the power is switched on and I start the MIOS studio, the MIDI IN window displays:
Scanning for MIDI Inputs…
[1] Midi Through Port-0
[2] USB MIDI Interface MIDI 1 (*)
MIDI Monitor ready.
[2747.429] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 0f 00 00 f7
[2747.432] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 0e 03 32 f7
[2747.674] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 0e 03 32 f7
[2747.902] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 0e 03 32 f7
…and the window below displays:
No response from MIOS8 or MIOS32 core!
Check MIDI IN/OUT connections
and Device ID!
After this begins a steady flow of this:
[2750.219] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 01 f7
When I press ‘Query’, I might get the message:
Operating System: MIOS8
Board: MBHP_CORE or similar
Core Family: PIC18F
Bootloader is up & running!
So I start uploading the file mios_v1_9g_pic18f4685.hex. What I get is:
mios_v1_9g_pic18f4685.hex contains 12830 bytes (52 blocks).
Range 0x00000000-0x00002fff (12288 bytes) - MIOS8 area
Range 0x00003000-0x000033ff (1024 bytes) - PIC Flash
Range 0x00007c00-0x00007fff (1024 bytes) - PIC Flash
WARNING: no response from core
Please reboot the core (e.g. turning off/on power)!
Waiting for upload request…
Received upload request!
MIOS8 Bootloader Mode cannot be entered - try again?
This is where it ends most of the time, though sometimes the upload apparently succeeds. But if I keep pressing the ‘Query’ button (with device ID always 0), I sometimes get “Bootloader is up & running”, sometimes “Application is up & running”, sometimes “No response from MIOS8 or MIOS32 core!”
This seems to be happening randomly. When the upload fails (as it does most of the time), the message always turns into the following, no matter what it said before:
No response from MIOS8 or MIOS32 core!
Check MIDI IN/OUT connections
and Device ID!
And the MIDI IN window message changes into:
[221.399] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 0f 00 00 f7
[221.400] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 0e 03 32 f7
[223.583] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 0e 06 01 f7
After these three lines the message changes back into:
[352.193] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 01 f7
Here’s a sample of what is the MIDI OUT window after an upload attempt has failed, and the whole sequence ends with “No response from MIOS8 or MIOS32 core!”:
[983.768] f0 00 00 7e 32 00 00 01 f7
[983.768] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 0d 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 f7
[984.010] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 02 00 00 00 01 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1a f7
[984.246] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 f7
[994.367] f0 00 00 7e 32 00 00 01 f7
[994.367] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 0d 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 f7
[994.602] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 02 00 00 00 01 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1a f7
[994.842] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 02 00 00 00 01 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1a f7
[995.066] f0 00 00 7e 40 00 02 00 00 00 01 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1a f7
(Personally I don’t understand anything of these numerical messages).
I’ve used two kinds of USB-MIDI cables, one is Roland’s UM-1G which, I later found, apparently has a bug with transmitting sysex messages:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=1852997&high=sysex&settheme=Blue%20Cake
The message is from October 2009, and I haven’t found any follow-up on this. I tried another cable, a cheap generic one, based on a hint in this thread:
http://discourse.midibox.org/t/topic/14690
..where the problems seemed somewhat like mine, even though I’ve never gotten error messages like “Upload aborted due to error #3: Checksum mismatch”, “Upload aborted due to error #11: MIDI IN Overrun Error”, or “Upload aborted due to error #1: Less bytes than expected have been received”.
I’ve run all the tests I’ve found on the website (but it could be I’ve missed some) on the core and the connection, the voltage tests at http://www.ucapps.de/mbhp_core.html (naturally) and under the headline ‘MIDI Interface Troubleshooting Guide’. As far as I can tell, LEDs flicker, light up etc as they should. I didn’t make any notes on the tests, just went them through one by one, so I can’t refer to anything else at the moment, but I can run them again if someone has ideas on any particular test(s).
At some point I managed to upload the program to test whether the core is communicating with the SID correctly, the one with different notes on the MIOS studio virtual keyboard assigning voltages to various pins of the SID. Those seemed to be working.
Is there a way to test whether the PIC is broken? Even though I don’t work with microcontrollers at my job (I work with 230/400VAC), I do have stuff like STK500 and Elnec Smartprog2 at my disposal, if for example there are further ways to test stuff with these. Any ideas? I can also send pics if that is helpful.




