HP Stream 7 & No Propeller found

Wildatheart

I managed to pick 2 Stream 7’s at the local Office Max yesterday for $79. The Parallax USB driver V2.10.00 installed successfully on the Stream tablet, however when activating “Identify Hardware” No Propeller is found on COM x.

My Sony convertible connected to the same Parallax Professional Development Board with the same cable works just fine. Both the Sony and the Stream are running Windows 8.1 and the only difference in the cable is that a USB micro male to USB A female adapter is added to connect to the Stream.

Neither TX or RX lights when “Identify Hardware” is pressed. Reinstalling the Parallax driver made no difference. Any idea what I should be doing differently?

localroger

I brought mine home for the weekend with the intention of testing it with the PropTool and SimpleIDE, I will be doing that tomorrow (Saturday) morning. I'll post the results.

abecedarian

If the Stream is anything like the Toshiba Encore 2 I have, you have to use a USB OTG (On The Go) cable to connect external devices to it. The typical USB A to B/micro will work for charging the tablet, at the typical USB - 500mA rate, but it won't enumerate the tablet to a computer nor will it do so for a device connected to the tablet without the OTG cable; i.e. even if the cable genders are correct, it still may not work. A quick test would be to plug a USB flash drive to the Stream with your cable and verify it enumerates properly.

FWIW, I've connected a few different flash drives, a couple USB-RS232 adapters and even a Sierra Wireless / AT&T modem and an external hard drive to my tablet without significant issue... using the OTG cable.

Also, some tablets have Bluetooth hardware, and possibly COM port redirects to virtual printers and such, so those may claim COM ports and prevent auto-detection in a program to fail. I ran across this issue with my tablet and a USB/RS232 adapter getting assigned a port number beyond what the program was programmed to detect, so had to manually re-assign the port, and everything was fine afterwards.

localroger

Yes, you need what they call an OTG adapter. The Stream 7 also has a hardware com1, and I can't figure out what it is since it doesn't have a serial port or any other obvious I/O that might be pretending to be one. My Digi EdgePort installs as com3.

localroger

Just now tested the Stream 7 with both the PropTool and SimpleIDE and both work fine. One wrinkle: The Stream 7 has a built in COM1 port which SimpleIDE will try to use. (What this COM port is actually doing is a bit of a mystery.) You have to manually switch to the COM port the FTDI chip loads to before downloading or the build will fail. The PropTool tries all the ports and so finds the Propeller automatically.

I tested with the Radio Shack LCD project which also involved powering the Prop ASC from the Stream on batteries. That worked fine too.

Heater.

I have no idea what's in an Intel Atom Z3735G Quad Core chip but if it's like a lot of ARM and MIPS SoCs as used in phones, tablets, routers and billions of embedded devices then it may have a built in UART or two. On many devices this this can be found and connected to, perhaps it has headers or test points on the PCB. Often used as the console port for the OS.

How I wish phones and tabs would bring out those UARTs for us to use.

localroger

It's maddeningly vague but it appears that according to these development board instructions

http://www.sharkscove.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Sharks-Cove-Developer-Guide.pdf

that the Atom has UART on chip ready to be brought out to a header. I guess Windows discovers this hardware and installs the driver, which is a Windowsy kind of thing to do, even if it's not brought out to the outside world.

jazzed

Heater. wrote: »

I have no idea what's in an Intel Atom Z3735G Quad Core chip but if it's like a lot of ARM and MIPS SoCs as used in phones, tablets, routers and billions of embedded devices then it may have a built in UART or two. On many devices this this can be found and connected to, perhaps it has headers or test points on the PCB. Often used as the console port for the OS.

How I wish phones and tabs would bring out those UARTs for us to use.

Edison has an Atom 32 bit Dual-Core with UARTs and other stuff. My Quickstart works in the OTG port after fumbling around with yacto embedded linux. Building a BoardOfEdison-Bot (BOEBOT) today ....

Wildatheart

A $5 OTG cable resolved the problem.

I never expected to see a PC (tablet) cost less than its' keyboard. Paid 79 bucks for the tablet and a whopping 99 bucks for the 'lil Microsoft Bluetooth keyboard. Something doesn't seem right about that. But it sure makes a nice portable package that connects with Parallax boards.

Thanks for the advice.

frank freedman

OTG and Parallax dev board....