Dead ARF

[DavidC]

My ARF board has failed (or reports as such on the web interface). I can't see any obvious mechanical reason for that, and the baro board still works OK. Am considering if worth sending back under warranty, but wondered if anybody else had a reliability issue. I really haven't used it that much. Wondered if plugging into/out of the power unit might have caused a glitch/spike (although no effect on the main Pi board or other devices).

The other point to note is that unless I'd looked at the web interface very carefully, I wouldn't have noticed. The unit still detects and reports ADS-B traffic. It would be useful to have some visual indication of healthy operation, e.g. an LED. I found the 4 LEDs on a certain F***M product very useful, showing ON, GPS locked, Tx and Rx respectively.

[Admin]

Did you plug in/out with power applied 
That sounds kind of ominous.

[DavidC]

No, I just powered up as normal (inserting the mains power supply USB connector into the socket) and it didn't work. I initially thought it might be because I'd updated the software but reverted to the 20150926 version which worked before.

So I can't quite figure out any reason for it. Just wondered if anyone else had come across this problem or if its a one-off.

Disappointing, since I was looking to link up and test with other units in the coming week or two. It works well for ADS-B already.

[JCurtis]

If you have an LED and a resistor (100 to 1K would be OK) and connect onto pin 6 of the ARF you can see if it heartbeats.

Pin6 -> LED -> Resistor -> GND

It flashes rapidly when it boots (1 or 2 seconds) then gives a 1Hz on/off if it has booted and it happy.  It will do this without being connected to anything, just power will do.  You might be able to just measure it with a multimeter if it's quick enough or one of the old analogue ones.

If it heartbeats, I'd suspect a wiring/comms problem.  If it doesn't heartbeat and does get 3.3v in then it may be terminal.

Pin six is on the same side as the power in, just the 6th one count the 3.3v in a number 1.

[Admin]

What do the screen boot messages say, it reports messages of the form
ARF-SER
when producing the diagnostic info

[DavidC]

Thanks for the tips. I'll experiment with the multimeter.

Screen prints diagnostics of attempting to connect to ARF at various baud rates, with multiple attempts until it times out and fails.

I's beginning to feel a bit like a Monty Python dead parrot sketch at the moment.