You are here

No USB connection

6 posts / 0 new
Last post
Flepple
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 11 months ago
Joined: 2020-11-26 11:34
Posts: 10
No USB connection

Hello,

I designed my own VESC Hardware and now I am trying to run the firmware. I use the STMF446 microcontroller. I tried to flash different firmwares/ bootloaders to the STM via SWD, but afterwards it will not connect via USB to the VESC Tool running on my Windows PC. I flashed some other software on the uC to prove if the SWD works and that´s fine. 

I don´t know what i can try next or what I am doing wrong. I followed the instructions from different forums. I connect the uC via St-Link from a Nucleo board and erase the flash memory. Afterwards I uploaded the BLDC_4_bootloader (e.g., I tried different ones), but I never get USB connection. The USB Port should be fine as well. 

Does somebody has any idea about that issue?

 

Thanks 

vadicus
Offline
Last seen: 13 hours 1 min ago
VESC Free
Joined: 2018-08-17 07:26
Posts: 426

That's the same as if you design a boat and arbitrarily decide to put an airplane engine in it. Would you expect it to work off the bat? Yes maybe, if you spend enough time adapting the an airplane engine for the boat.

A quick comparison shows that STMF446 has 512kb of flash memory at the most and the firmware requires 1Mb which is why F405 is used. Other chips might work but you would need to adapt the firmware and that may not be worth the trouble if you can just use what's recommended in the first place.

 

 

NextGen FOC High voltage 144v/34s, 30kw (https://vesc-project.com/node/1477)

Flepple
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 11 months ago
Joined: 2020-11-26 11:34
Posts: 10

Is the firmware really that big? Shouldn't I get an error when uploading? If you´re sure I will change to the F405. It´s not about costs. We just have the F446 as common uC at our workshop, so I decided to use this one. I thought I read somewhere that it is possible to run the firmware on every STMF4.

vadicus
Offline
Last seen: 13 hours 1 min ago
VESC Free
Joined: 2018-08-17 07:26
Posts: 426

The firmware is tuned specifically for 405 but I saw people ran it also on 407 as it's very close in specs. You can likely make it work on other processors but you would need to adapt it which can be quite an undertaking. It's really about how much time and effort you want to put into re-writing and testing things as opposed to using an already supported chip where the fw works out of the box. There so many other things to worry about while designing a controller. 

 

 

NextGen FOC High voltage 144v/34s, 30kw (https://vesc-project.com/node/1477)

Flepple
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 11 months ago
Joined: 2020-11-26 11:34
Posts: 10

Hmm alright that´s pretty bad. I don´t get an F405 fast... The only problem I have is that i don´t get an USB connection for VESC  Tool. 

vadicus
Offline
Last seen: 13 hours 1 min ago
VESC Free
Joined: 2018-08-17 07:26
Posts: 426

How do you know everything else works? 

 

 

NextGen FOC High voltage 144v/34s, 30kw (https://vesc-project.com/node/1477)