[beagleboard] Is my BB Bricked

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1

Hello,

         My beagleboard seems to have a problem; when I boot it only
shows one LED on the board (the PWR LED). Also, cannot get anything
down the RS232 link at all. I have the feeling that I probably need
to get a new BB but I wanted to check with you kind people to see if
anyone knows of something else that could be the problem. The board
hasn;t had any electrical or physical shocls so I'm guessing it is
just bad luck but maybe someone could advise me as to if it is skip
material?

Cheers,

Neil

2

Have you tried to reflash the board using the information found at

http://code.google.com/p/beagleboard/wiki/BeagleboardRevCValidation

In order to force the board to boot from the SD card, you must hold the USER buttton down while pressing and releasing the reset button.

Gerald

3

Have you tried to reflash the board using the information found at

http://code.google.com/p/beagleboard/wiki/BeagleboardRevCValidation

In order to force the board to boot from the SD card, you must hold the USER buttton down while pressing and releasing the reset button.

Thanks for your reply; tried that trick but nothing; no signal on the RS232 line and only 1 LED is illuminated.

Cheers,

Neil

4

OK. I can only go by what you say you are doing. You can request an RMA and send it in. They have never failed to unbrick a board, so if that is the only issue it takes about 13 seconds to fix. If is something else, then they can fix that issue as well.

Gerald

5

Hello,

That’s great thanks for your help - who do I send the board to to reqeust an RMA?

Cheers,

Neil

6

http://beagleboard.org/support/rma

Gerald

7

One thing came to my mind. You said there are no RS232 traffic. Are you sure you provide GND for the RS232 PIN5 and you have Rx PIN2 and Tx PIN3 connected according to Beagleboard user manual?
Are you using USB RS232 adapter? Have you tried it works. You can loop pins 2 & 3 and echo characters from keyboard to see if you can receive them.

I had same kind of problems at first when I got the Beagleboard and it was combination of 2 issues:

  1. RS 232 wasn’t in the same ground as other system and
  2. I didn’t have SD card properly formatted. You need to strictly follow formatting instructions found from Beagleboard.org.

Hope this helps.

-Petri-

8

Hello,

Thanks fo rthe mail - I checked the RS232 adapter out on my other beagleboard and it works fine - also this board used to work it just stopped working recently. I’ve already checked out the cable by hooking up to another computer to see if it works - no probs. I also checked my minicom with the othr working board and that works fine so I know the minicom settings are correct. I even swapped out hte RS232 cables and adapter for another but still nothing! I have also checked the sd card on my other beagleboard and it works fine. In addition I tried without the sd card in the broken BB and still nothing appears (I would have thought the x-loader would be showing but nothing happens at all).

I’m leaning towards a hardware problem here tbh.

Cheers,

Neil