Hi,
I've been using the nuelectronics data logger shield for several months now and slowly learning how things work. All my testing up until recently has been done with Uno's and everything has worked fine, once I understood how things work. I recently hooked one of the shields up to my Mega 2560 and started getting garbage from the ds1302 RTC on it. It just gives 2165 as year and 165 for other numbers. If I take the same shield off (I have seven of them and I have tried them all) and put it on one of my Unos it runs the same sketch just fine, so it's not a software problem and the boards themselves seem to be fine. The Mega is still able to use the SD slot and the other pins on the shield, so it seems like everything is fine there, so I cannot understand why the Mega would be a problem. Is this a problem with using the SD card on the Mega since the software SPI interface is necessary? I'm using the sd.h library that's part of Arduino and the ds1302 library that is described here: Reading RTC in nuElectronics Data Logger Shield for Arduino - ar3ne1rtc. It's part of a library using Petit FAT file library that is suggested for use by Nuelectronics, and while I no longer use the petit FAT library, I didn't see a reason to change the RTC stuff since it works fine on the Uno. I've seen there are several other libraries for use with this chip and I'm considering switching to one, but that's going to add a lot of learning and debugging which would be fine if it works, but I don't want to waste a lot of time if it just turns out that there is some bug in the shield that keeps it from working with a Mega. Even the hope that this would work would be worth switching to a new library...
Has anyone run into this problem and found a workaround or had success with a particular library? I've contacted Nuelectronics three times and haven't heard back (my first email was over a month ago when I first found this problem). I have to admit that I can get away without the RTC for the current project I'm working on, but there are some good things I could do if I did have it working properly. Any suggestions/help would be appreciated! I have attached the simplest code I'm using that just reads and displays the RTC time every second or so. Since it's not doing anything else, it seems it should work (and it does work on the Uno's) so I'm stumped...
/*RTC_read
ver: 6 Jly 2010
Simple, simple test of access to DS1302
in nuelectonics.com datalog shield
Taken from Reading RTC in nuElectronics Data Logger Shield for Arduino - ar3ne1rtc
*/
#include <DS1302.h>
#include <mmc.h>
#include <RTC_define.h>
DS1302 ds1302;
RTC rtc;
void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
Serial.println("Welcome to RTC reader....");
}
void loop() {
int iYr,iMth,iDay,iDOW,iHr,iMin,iSec;
ds1302.gettime(&rtc);//As usual: the case of letters matters.
iYr=rtc.year;//Must be put into "int" type variable... byte won't do.
iMth=rtc.month;//The "rtc" part is chosen by the programmer of this code.
iDay=rtc.mday;//Day of month, e.g. Christmas's is "25"
iDOW=rtc.wday;//Day of week... 0,1,2...6. Or is it 1,2,3...7?
iHr=rtc.hour;//What comes after the "." is defined within the
iMin=rtc.min;//code included with #include, above. Not easily changed.
iSec=rtc.sec;
//Yes... what is in next block IS done crudely. I know.
//The point is to show you where things are... not to be
//clever with printing to the serial monitor!
Serial.print(iDay);Serial.print("-");//Print Jan 2nd, 2010 as 2-1-2010
Serial.print(iMth);Serial.print("-");
Serial.print(iYr);Serial.print(", Day of week: ");
Serial.print(iDOW);Serial.print(". Time is ");
Serial.print(iHr);Serial.print(":");//Then the time
Serial.print(iMin);Serial.print(":");
Serial.print(iSec);
Serial.println();//and start new line
delay(1000);//Will print the time ALMOST once per second. Once
//in a while, the DISPLAY will, skip, leave out a second, i.e.
//jump, say, from 12:13:14 to 12:13:16... but the time reported
//will always be correct.
}