pc and Mac unable to communicate with mayfly ver. 0.5b

Hi Dave,

Don’t kick me for this, but is the Mayfly turned on? There’s a little toggle switch near the USB jack.

Sometimes they do get “fried” and others know the trouble-shooting steps better than I do, but I see users missing the on-off toggle a lot.

Beth

What software are you using to connect? What are you doing to confirm that it isn’t connecting? Are you trying to upload a sketch, or are you looking at it through a serial monitor?

Have you confirmed the com-port? A PC will number the com ports sequentially (a new port for every Mayfly you connect). A Mac will have a long string assigned to the port that will include USB somewhere in the string.

The bluetooth port is not your mayfly.

I did this tutorial that could get you acquainted with the serial monitor: https://envirodiy.github.io/LearnEnviroDIY/01-ArduinoBasics/index.html

What’s uploaded on your Mayfly will determine the baud rate for the serial monitor. It looks like you haven’t uploaded anything yet, but there’s an existing sketch on the board. It’s getting power and charging (per the lights you see). The baud rate is probably slower than 57600.

If the existing sketch is from the EnviroDIY Modular Sensors code wrapper, the serial baud should be 115200. In the arduino IDE, connected with usb, mayfly power on, if you press the little magnifying lens at the top right corner of the window for any sketch, that will open the serial monitor. You should be prompted to manually select the port (something with USB if you are on a mac) and baudrate (115200, maybe).

Did Blink successfully upload? The mayfly can only handle one sketch at a time. The fact that your board is flashing in the ways you describe means that it is probably not fried.

As far as I can detect, you have not yet connected to your board. The serial monitor would be a way to connect to any board and see what’s on it. There are lots of charging cables that do not convey data, so that could be an issue. Now that you have learned about the serial port, try a few different cables again to see if that’s the issue.

You also need to have the Mayfly driver. In the Arduino IDE under Tools>Boards Manager, you need to confirm that the Mayfly is selected. (https://www.envirodiy.org/mayfly/software/)

The Mayfly doesn’t have a bluetooth radio built in, so that port is not actually the one that is connected to a Mayfly. The bluetooth port is everpresent on Macs because you have bluetooth on your computer, but the Mayfly would require an extra radio to be able to connect by bluetooth. This is not the correct port to view what’s happening on the Mayfly. The correct port will have “usb” somewhere in the string.

Mine looks something like this:

If the usb port doesn’t exist, then the most probable cause is that the driver is not installed or not valid/current.

Nope. The instructions here: https://www.envirodiy.org/mayfly/software/ say to not use 2.0. I don’t use the Arduino IDE for anything but getting people started. But the tutorial I sent will lead you to this Mayfly driver and through a whole set of steps that will get you up and running. It may look TLDR, but I think it will help.

Here’s a video of the process of installing the driver:

https://mediaspace.minnstate.edu/media/Mayfly+driver+in+Arduino+IDE/1_py60bdus

If your Mac isn’t seeing the Mayfly as a USB device in your computer OS list of current devices, then you need to install the FTDI drivers from the device website at https://ftdichip.com/drivers/vcp-drivers/

Mac and Windows 10 should automatically install those drivers whenever a Mayfly is connected to a computer for the first time, but sometimes company or school security software or configurations will limit the computers from automatically installing those drivers, requiring you to do it manually.

Once you’ve installed the VCP driver, your computer should see the Mayfly as a USB device and will assign it a COM port (or on a Mac it’ll give it a somewhat cryptic port designation as Beth showed above with the screenshot).  You shouldn’t attempt to troubleshoot communications issues with the Arduino IDE until you’ve confirmed that the computer can see the Mayfly.  And as Beth mentioned, many USB cable don’t actually contain all the proper data lines because they’re only a basic charging cable, or those pins in the connector or wires in the cable can get damaged or broken, causing there to be no communication.  I’d recommend trying a couple different cables (from different manufacturers) and different USB ports on your computer.  If none of those work, then try a different computer, if it’s still not being seen, then you might have damaged the USB cable on the Mayfly, in which case the only way to communicate with it is to buy a “CP2104 Friend” from Adafruit, solder 6-pin right angle header pins (male) to the end of it and connect it to the 6-pin FTDI socket on the Mayfly.  This bypasses the FT232RL FTDI interface chip on the Mayfly and allows you to program the board directly.

You don’t have to add the Mayfly to the Board Manager of the Arduino IDE if you simply want to view the serial output using the Serial Monitor of the IDE.  You only have to add the Mayfly support files to Board Manager if you want to program your Mayfly.  If your Mayfly is already programmed with any of our recommended sketches, it should be printing something to the USB port on startup, and usually during whatever loop it is running.  However, if you inherited this board from someone else, there’s no way to know what sketch is on it unless the Mayfly prints that information to the Serial Monitor.  Do you know what it was previously used for?

If there’s a CR1220 watch battery installed in the battery slot on the Mayfly (with sufficient voltage) then the RS3231 RTC will still be alive and continuing to think it’s whatever time it thinks it is. However if the board has been sitting in storage for awhile and not attached to a main Lipo battery, it’s likely that the CR1220 is dead and therefore the RTC doesn’t retain any time information, and it will reset itself to 1/1/2000 every time the Mayfly starts up until you add a new CR1220 and set the clock.  If there’s a cellular modem on the Mayfly board, then it will attempt the contact the time server to set the RTC upon bootup (assuming you’re running one of our recommended sketches built on the ModularSensors examples we share on Github).

If the clock is still running but is just wrong because the clock was set wrong sometime in the past, you could see what time is currently being reported, then do the math (easiest in Excel) to get the offset between the correct NOW time and the incorrect NOW time, and then apply that offset to all of the stored data on the logger’s memory card.   If your Mayfly is running one of those recommended logger sketches, then it will print a variety of helpful information to the Serial Monitor upon startup, including the date/time of the RTC, and other configuration settings of the deployment.  If you reprogram the Mayfly with another sketch before you see any of that, then it’ll be lost, so I’d recommend only trying to read the data from the Mayfly serial port until you get things going smoothly with the computer and not trying to upload any new sketches until you’re able to connect reliably and correctly to the Mayfly with the USB port on your computer.   The previous sketch is probably transmitting at either 115200 or 5600 baud.  That speed only refers to comunications through the Serial Monitor and doesn’t affect the upload speed used when burning a new sketch to the board.

The Adafruit CP2104 Friend has the correct 6-pin layout to work perfectly with the FTDI interface header on all Mayfly versions.  The attached photo shows one connected to a Mayfly 1.0 but you can connect it to the Mayfly v0.5b the exact same way. Give that a try and see if you’re able to communicate with the Mayfly board.  If not, it’s possible the corrosion on the board is the cause of your problems.  If that’s the case, you could try cleaning the corrosion off using acetone or 91% isopropyl alcohol and an old toothbrush.  But if the corrosion caused a part on the board to be damaged when it was powered up, then it’s like unsalvageable.  The Mayfly v.05b boards have been discontinued as have the v1.0 boards, but the v1.1 boards will hopefully be listed as single items on Amazon sometime soon, but I don’t know the date yet.

That’s great, I’m glad it worked.  Based on your screenshot, I can tell that your station is running a sketch that I programmed onto that Mayfly board in March of 2018.  It’ll still work if you’re using the same CTD and turbidity sensor it originally had on it, and it will save data to the memory card every 5 minutes.  It had the ability to transmit data to our older database system using a 2G cell modem, but those modems are no longer available and that database has been replaced with Monitor My Watershed.  The RTC clock on the Mayfly may still be correct if the CR1220 battery is still good, but it might not if the station has been in storage awhile without a main lipo battery.  That clock would have been set in 2018 to Eastern Standard Time, so it will appear to be one hour off from the current local time now.  Nowadays we program all our RTC clocks to GMT time instead, to be compatible with the MMW database.  If you end up needing to reprogram your Mayfly at some point in the future but still want to keep using that OBS3+ turbidity sensor, you’ll need the sensor’s 6 calibration coefficients from the calibration sheet that it was originally shipped with, which we still have in our records.  You can send me an email at mayfly@envirodiy.org and I can provide those numbers to you so you can put them into the new logger sketch.

And for reference, here’s a better picture of how I soldered the right-angle header pins onto my CP2104 board.