Serial connection (j18) is definitely dead...

Question

Hi all. I have been having immense fun with my Riotboard, getting a debian distribution working and figuring out how to program audio and the GPIOs using python and C++. This was up till about a 2 weeks ago when the serial port (j18) decided to stop working. It simply stopped being able to send or recieve anything.. I checked the connections about 5 times and even bought a new CP2102 USB to TTL converter and the result was the same.. No response either way when the ground wire is connected, and no working carriage return or display when it isn't....I have contacted Elemnt 14 technical about it but they are being very slow with their response..Has anyone else had a serial port blow out on them?

tusharp · Accepted Answer

Well. The situation has got worse. My board has DIED 
 Now I am RIoTboardless.

sry to know that, but the Riot journey shouldn't stop . I have talked to support team and its been understood the board is at fault and requested to give a new replacement board. the procedure will take a few days.

Former Member · Answer

I've never had the misfortune to kill a serial port.

All I would say is that if you look at the schematic these pins go directly to the SoC, there's no buffering or protection. It's likely to be easier to overload these than you'd think and the only fix is to replace the SoC. Realistically that's going to mean a new board..

If there's nothing else wrong, then it may be possible to use one of the other uart ports instead. How easy that would be depends a lot on whether you're using android or linux and just how good you are at tracking down all of the places you need to configure the new port.

Further debugging may be possible if you have access to a scope and other appropriate equipment.. A starting point for this is to connect the TX & RX on your USB cable together - having done that what you type in the terminal program should get sent back to the screen - simple way to check the cable is functional to some degree..