BENCH TEST GOTCHAS

Weird things that happen on the bench, and what to do about them.

1) Can't get ARM heartbeat.

a) Power cycle the board.

b) If you've already power cycled the board, do it again, and maybe one more time that doesn't work.

c) Look at the two LEDs at the top edge of the board. If they're both on, you have run into the infamous low voltage bug that has no know solution. Usually, a couple of passes with compressed air or picking it up and shaking or disconnecting the DAS probes, or just going out for a beer does the trick, but not always.

2) Can't get debugger to run.

a) If it says that it can't open device, there is another copy of the debugger running. Do cntl-alt-del and kill ADW.

b) If it reads a few bytes then quits, either the board is not booted (check the heartbeat) or the serial line is disconnected, or the debugger is just being disagreeable. Usually a restart works.

Some tips on this:

· Always power cycle the board and check for a heartbeat before you start the debugger.

· It's safer to kill the debugger and restart it than to reload the application from the debugger. Sometimes the reload command works, but not always.

· Always kill the debugger before you turn off power to the board, otherwise the debugger will hang.

3) Can't get the DAS window up.

a) Check to see if the laptops IP address has changed. To do this:

· Go to the startup menu and open the Exceed folder.

· Start Xstartup.

· Open labdas2 (or baba2).

· Run that cool command that you told me about that I've

· already forgotten, to get the current IP address.

· Change the IP address in the command box on Xstartup.

· Save

· Click Run! on the Xstartup window.

b) If that doesn't work, the DAS may think that it has a connection open already. This will make it refuse you connection request. Only fix I know of for this is to power cycle the DAS. You can check to see if this is the problem by running rsh labdas2 <the contents of the Xstart command box> on a Unix machine. The DAS will tell you.

· Always close the DAS window before logging off or shutting down the laptop. Otherwise, the DAS does not know that the connection peer has gone away.

4) Laptop went to sleep, now can’t get DAS to respond.

When the laptop goes to sleep, all network connections are terminated, including the DAS. It’s just like rebooting or shutting off the laptop without closing the DAS window. The best way to prevent this is to NEVER close the laptop lid. In general, recovery from sleep for 98 machines is not very reliable, so it’s not a good idea to depend on it anyway. Windows 2000 is supposed to be much better, but I haven’t checked out what it does with network connections.