How to connect to the test points on WIFI board

Official Hardware UNO Family UNO R4 WiFi
1

I am wondering if anyone has suggestions on the best way to solder up connections to some of the test points associated with the ESP32

In particular I would like to be able to see the Serial communications between the two processors.

For the logical USB Serial (Serial) it was easy to find
image
On pins 3 and 5 of the connector shown.

But would also like to see the Serial2 communications. I believe these are on the little test points near the ESP32.

image
image395×509 15.6 KB

I believe the ones I sort of show arrows to. Although I may want to see some of the other signals as well.

Has anyone connected up to any of these test points? suggestions on how? They are small, and close to each other.

I assume there is nothing like a debug shield for these boards? That maybe have pogo pins for all of the test points?

Maybe in the next few days I will get brave enough to try soldering some simple wires to these points, but I am hoping for a better option.

2

sorry, but why do you want to see the communication? maybe there are simpler solutions to get what you want

3

Thanks Juraj,

Part of this is curiosity, like the cheat sheet mentions the pads:
[Arduino UNO R4 WiFi Cheat Sheet | Arduino Documentation]

Arduino UNO R4 WiFi Cheat Sheet | Arduino Documentation

shows these pads
ESP32-pads.png (1920×1080) (arduino.cc)

But more specifically, two reasons I am wanting to see these signals are:

  1. I am testing reasonably extensive changes to the SerialX(UART) code on the main processor, and as part of my testing, I want to make sure BT and WIFI work. My first try of the BT Scan module failed yesterday to initialize the adapter. So I want to debug that. Today will try simple Wifi one to see if that one starts.
    Details about the changes are in the draft Pull Request
    Serial: Tx use FIFO plus fixes by KurtE · Pull Request #90 · arduino/ArduinoCore-renesas (github.com)

  2. I am curious about the issue described in:
    UNO R4 WiFi disconnecting/reconnecting continuously when running sketch w/ "LED_Matrix" and "ArduinoBLE" libraries - UNO R4 / UNO R4 WiFi - Arduino Forum
    So hoped maybe seeing the communications between the two processors and timing of the Matrix interrupts, might shed some light on it. Like are all of the interrupts causing something like RX overruns? Can possibly test that out without seeing the signals but might help to shed more light.

5

you could provide Serial wrapper instead of Serial2 in the WiFi library. that would redirect to Serial2 but also to Serial

this handles only one way, but you get the idea
https://github.com/JAndrassy/StreamLib/blob/master/src/TeePrint.h

2 Likes
6

Thanks,

May try something like that.

I have done something similar to this in the past. Including versions who try to simply cache the data into memory, that we can then later print. May have to try that again.
Maybe with an extended version, which maybe keeps time stamps.
That way maybe can correlate the data with other outputs to the Logic Analyzer.

I may still try to solder something onto the test points for IO4 and IO5 and maybe a few others...

Side note: tested this morning with the ScanNetworks (wifi) test and it appears to work. Now back to BLE tests.