Tonight the task was to gauge which of the old boards were working and what their condition was. Fortunately all three were able to output over the serial, hoorah. However, the RTC, SD card and sensor still had to be checked. Unfortunately, I don’t have a micro-SD card to boot the board from and so this quickly came to a halt.
This fail-safe was written into the firware so a user could avoid making the mistake of setting the sensor off without the SD card. Although it has saved me in the field countless times, tonight it does the opposite.
Before I can progress with the testing I first need to modify the firware to skip the SD card check, or at least to bypass if sent a specific command over serial. Tomorrow night I will address this problem and upload the new firmware ready to return to testing!
Dan Mannion - Electronic Engineer 