Uzebox SMD soldering

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danboid
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Re: Uzebox SMD soldering

Post by danboid »

Great to hear that you've got a Pi400! Not only can you use that to flash your bootloader with avrdude's GPIO support, you could realistically and quite comfortably develop for the Uzebox on the Pi400 because it is fast enough to run cuzebox at full speed and build times won't be long if you are building your project on the pi, espesh if you also use ccache to reduce rebuild times.
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JimmyDansbo
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Re: Uzebox SMD soldering

Post by JimmyDansbo »

So I managed to get the MCU programmed through the windows tool that comes with the Minipro TL866II+
It is actually possible to see the hex code that the different fuse settings generates.
xgpro-uzebox.png
xgpro-uzebox.png (46.78 KiB) Viewed 338 times

I followed https://uzebox.org/wiki/Avrdude, ensured the fuses were set correctly and that Bootloader5.hex was loaded and burned the MCU.

Now my Uzebox starts up and it is actually able to load my UzeMaze game from the SD card, but after a few seconds the board just powers off.
This happens when I have S-Video plug connected. If I use Composite, things are stable for a couple of minutes before the board powers off.

With S-Video connected, if I leave the power connected after the board has powered off, it burns C13 (it is actually quite black now).

After replacing C13, which is a 10uF 6.3V tantalum capacitor according to the F5 BOM, with a 10uF 50V electrolytic capacitor things seem to be running stable. I don't know if I have just touched on an edge case where the 6.3V tantalum can't handle the voltage or there might be an error in the BOM?
According the the schematic it looks like C13 should be an electrolytic capacitor...

EDIT: I did not notice that the 10uF 6.3V tantalum capacitor is actually polarized. The fault was most likely that I installed it backwards. Fortunately everything works just fine with the electrolytic capacitor.
Last edited by JimmyDansbo on Tue Mar 14, 2023 3:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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danboid
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Re: Uzebox SMD soldering

Post by danboid »

Congrats on getting your Uzebox (mostly) running Jimmy! If you did it in a day then you did at least 400X faster than me. I can't see my slack Uzebox construction record being broken any time soon.

I'm sure Uze will appear soon enough to answer your question.

I should have some joypad compat and keyboard adapter updates tonight.
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danboid
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Re: Uzebox SMD soldering

Post by danboid »

I was disappointed your X16 didn't make an appearance in the soldering video. Are you going to do a video demonstrating your DIY X16 too?
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JimmyDansbo
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Re: Uzebox SMD soldering

Post by JimmyDansbo »

Yeah, I was so focused on the SMD soldering that I forgot all about letting the Wavicle CX16 make a cameo.

As you can probably see from the quality of my video, I am not used to creating Youtube videos and don't really have much content to create more videos.
I don't think that a video about a community created cx16 clone would have much of an audience now that The 8-Bit Guy has started sending out development boards.

Maybe my screenshort of the Minipro software could be used in a tutorial on how to program the MCU with a Minipro?
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danboid
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Re: Uzebox SMD soldering

Post by danboid »

Feel free to add that screenshot to the wiki. I'm much more interested in hearing whether avrdude actually works via GPIO for flashing a Uzebox as many more people own RPi's than dedicated chip programmers.
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JimmyDansbo
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Re: Uzebox SMD soldering

Post by JimmyDansbo »

I was unable to make it work with my RP400.
Reason: Too cheap dupont cables not making good connections + faulty capacitor installed on the Uzebox board.

Now that I think about it, it seems it is most like only the faulty capacitor that was the fault... I will try it again.
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JimmyDansbo
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Re: Uzebox SMD soldering

Post by JimmyDansbo »

I managed to flash the MCU through GPIO pins on my Raspberry Pi.

I have updated the avrdude wiki page.
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danboid
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Re: Uzebox SMD soldering

Post by danboid »

Great news and good work enhancing the wiki Jimmy! That's a very useful addition.
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uze6666
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Re: Uzebox SMD soldering

Post by uze6666 »

EDIT: I did not notice that the 10uF 6.3V tantalum capacitor is actually polarized. The fault was most likely that I installed it backwards. Fortunately everything works just fine with the electrolytic capacitor.
It's indeed polarized. Through a tantalum was not essential, I made many tests back in the days and noticed it created noticeably less color banding in certain cases. Btw, did you have the assembly guide handy, I think it's mentioned in there to be careful about that capacitor. In any case, new TODO: Make sur the guide is easy to find on the wiki and main site.
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