BS2px24 Rev A reliability?

SgtBFGunner

Bought this stamp a while ago and had problems with it's reliability and kind of put it away. I'd like to determine if it's dead or not.
I have read about timing issues, usb issues, power issues, etc. involved with these chips. I have made sure of good power, good usb cable, installed Parallax's USB drivers, changed the timing on the USB port. 99.9 pervcent of the time I get a "No BASIC Stamps Found". 0.1% of the time it will show up properly as "BASIC Stamp 2px24 v1.0". I try to push some code to it and get the "EEPROM verify failure!". Not sure if the code is the issue for the EEPROM verify problem because I have never been able to successfully use this chip for any amount of time.
I have never had problems with any of my BS2's. Why the troubles with the PX24, is it that fickle?
I'd appreciate your thoughts.
Happy Holidays,
Gary

VonSzarvas

Do you have the Chrome browser installed? Might be interesting to try Parallax IDE, which you find in the Google Chrome App Store.

Parallax IDE is an alternative basic stamp IDE that will run on any OS running Chrome (including Chromebooks).

SgtBFGunner

VonSzarvas wrote: »

Do you have the Chrome browser installed? Might be interesting to try Parallax IDE, which you find in the Google Chrome App Store.

Parallax IDE is an alternative basic stamp IDE that will run on any OS running Chrome (including Chromebooks).

Thanks. That's pretty cool. No bueno though... Still not detected.

SgtBFGunner

Another thing I noticed is that the interpreter chip gets hot when I keep refreshing the identification operation for the stamp. So it has to be processing something. And once out of a hundred times it will identify, but then disappears again.

Bad chip? Should not be this much work to deal with a completed product. All my BS2's and Propellers work just fine.

SgtBFGunner

So I dug out the static bag to get the BS2px24 stamp ready to send back to Parallax.
I popped the stamp out of the Board of Education and reseated it. Tried again and now the stamp works... Have had plenty of troubles with this particular chip, we'll see if it stays good. Can't just be that simple. We'll see.

VonSzarvas

That's good to know. Please keep us posted and let's hope you solved it!

kwinn

SgtBFGunner wrote: »

So I dug out the static bag to get the BS2px24 stamp ready to send back to Parallax.
I popped the stamp out of the Board of Education and reseated it. Tried again and now the stamp works... Have had plenty of troubles with this particular chip, we'll see if it stays good. Can't just be that simple. We'll see.

It may be a case of bad contacts due to oxidation or humidity. Not unusual to find on the sockets, IC pins, and PCB pins. For some older instruments using an ink eraser to clean pins became a part of my PM check list. Sockets were occasionally a problem and had to be cleaned with contact cleaner or replaced with gold plated sockets.