What to do when a review doesn't go as planned

When I have a road test with issues, I usually log a ticket on the supplier's support system. I then write about the progress of that ticket in my review blogs - good and/or bad experience.

if it goes really bad, I send  heads-up to the road test organisers - so that they can inform their contact at the supplier.

edit: I add a link to the road test or my blog in the ticket, when I create one specific for that.

It is certainly frustrating when something like this stalls a review or causes a lot of time to be spent on something trivial.

Manufacturer involvement would seem to be the only real solution here, as Jan points out.

Interesting work-around though - running with scope probes attached... (Does this mean you could kludge on physical caps?)

The datasheet says the setting can be changed through a test register for prototyping purposes. So it's possible that the software tool you're using is meant to be doing that behind the scenes, though it does rather look like they might have taken the tool for another part and not changed all the things that they should have done.

Thanks Jan. I believe this is the path forward and I will see where it goes. I like your idea of writing a blog post, If I am going go to the trouble of documenting the issue, I might as well post it in a blog post as well.

Nice discovery in the datasheet! Hmm, I wonder where this test register is. Also interesting is they don't list the 32KLOAD_OTP value in the OTP table, so the load caps may be disabled by default in this OTP version (CID4=0x01).

This is certainly not what I had expected to see, the 32k oscillator fail to start. Fortunately, there is an on die ~32kHz RC fail-safe oscillator. 

Yes, normally this is a good way to drown out a 32kHz oscillator, lol. The board designer did include not fitted load caps, so I can make the on board 32kHz XO function, just not what I was expecting from a Maxim EVK...

At this point I'm still not sure who made the mistake.

There are also a number of silly unit typos in the datasheet (which does happens, just annoying to see):

I too see the same thing happening wherein the register values are incorrectly mapped against the capacitance value choices. But I am curious, why that value needs to be changed/configured? Seems like internally it's taking default capacitance value and clocks fine. Simply for testing purposes? Alright.

Apart, there are minor bugs where the whole 'register explorer' tab GUI minimizes when the configuration tray is pulled down(i saw it happening twice. now, not finding where exactly was it,......murphy is real)

Don't let my experiences bias your review of the EVK. Its plausible your board is different from mine. I look forward to reading your review .

Cool, alright. I wouldn't have figured that out otherwise.

No worries. Maxim missed it too!