Digisparks fail after days/hours

Community General Discussion
1

hi everyone, so i have a problem with digispark attin85 chips.

i use alot of these in my home business for small basic led effects in models that we make, however as of recently, and it has always been an issue but on a much smaller scale, the boards seem to be dropping out.

what i mean by that is, they work perfectly fine for a while, it can be hours or days, then the green power light will come on, but the code that it was programmed with doesnt load.

the process we use is always the same:

  1. load arduino ide
  2. open sketch wanted
  3. ensure digispark (default 16.5mhz) is selected
  4. ensure microneucleus is selected
  5. hit upload
  6. insert board into usb and wait till done, then remove from usb.

for the electrical installation we use usb cables to power it, soldered directly to the GND and 5v
the output pins always have the relevant size resistor for the leds its driving. always making sure there are no shorts as well.

i have had some sent back and they will not take further programing, just "usb not recognised"

i will say that i do buy clones from china, for two reasons, they are more reliable than the official ones surprisingly, i bought 5 legit and only one actually worked. bought 40 clones and they all took code straight away except 3.

but any thoughts as to why these are failing after random amounts of time would be helpful.

2

I've that problem too....Ended up using Optiboot.

@DrAzzy can you shine any light on what the issue is?

3

cant say im familiar with optiboot, a google of it says about larger sketches but i never max out the capacity for them so thats not really an issue, im guessing it has a more stable bootloader than whats on the digisparks already?

4

Slightly, there is a bug in it however....You need to reburn the bootloader if you keep reprogramming it.

5

fair! i just gotta find a more reliable way of using these or a reliable, just as low cost alternative because when they fail, i have to replace the entire model as due to the cost of the models, its not worth them being sent back for replacements.

6

I suppose you are using this repo for the board ATTinyCore.
If so just select Optiboot wire up your board to the ISP programmer, select the correct Serial port, then Hit burn bootloader.

Of course, you'll find more detailed instructions within the repo.

7

not as far as i know, i installed the digispark driver and the library in the board managers section of the arduino idea.

8

Have never seen one, have you got a link?

1 Like
9
10

I think @killzone_kid was querying the 84 ... ?
:thinking:

11

Thwt would be a typo lol

12

So would that new bootloader solve thd problems of the chips stopping working?

13

It could quite likely fix the problem....If that doesn't work you can just upload using ISP without a bootloader.

1 Like
14

i'll give it a go, the point of these chips are they're meant to be plug in, program, unplug, simple, not faffing about but lately they've been really unreliable.

1 Like
15

Be sure to bootload each part with the latest micronucleus using your favorite ISP programmer. This also gets you a bunch of extra space because the clones ship with a version of the bootloader so old that cyberarcheologists still aren't sure if it was written by modern humans, or by neandertals.

You gain like 1k of flash or something from using the new bootloader, and it's less buggy.

1 Like
16

This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.