Skywriter + Pi3

Support
21

This came into my inbox. Sorry. I’ve also been investigating the Skywriter issues and I think we made some headway today and yesterday as @RogueM suggests.

1 Like
22

@open yes, it’s definitely possible that the new firmware could improve things for you, so it will be worth a try.

… that answer is valid for you, possibly other people who have posted herein, as long as the issue has to do with the Skywriter’s response. That won’t include everyone so anyone reading this and not having symptoms similar to the original poster, please refrain to post herein, create a new topic and we’ll take it from there!

23

My assumption is skywriter does not work with pi 3 or my units are broken.

24

I don’t think it’s an issue related to the Pi3 specifically, we don’t expect it to be a factor at least for this particular issue anyhow.

25

What is the issue then?

26

It could be any combination of factors related to production, near-field chips require profiling and the 2-year old firmware appears to be non-optimal at this stage - so we’re issuing an update.

@gadgetoid will post herein when it’s posting to github, with outline of the process.

27

Yes I got a reply, in fact more than one :)
The lines of communications are now open, unfortunately Canada Post is going on strike. So no Skywriter will reach me soon. Nothing to do with Pimoroni, obviously. Just my bad karma

28

I’ll be preparing and testing an in-the-field firmware update file today. We’re still unsure exactly what changed to necessitate a re-calibration of the Skywriter HAT. It may have been a hardware revision in the chip or some impossible to observe change to the geometry of the PCB. Unfortunately they still worked well enough to pass our testing process :(

With any luck, it should be possible to revive units in the field with this new firmware. Instructions will be posted here once I’ve done the necessary preparation and testing and sent to anyone who’s on our radar as having this particular fault.

We’ll be rolling out boards with the new calibration from now on, and revising our testing procedure to more thoroughly check the sensor response.

29

I’ve prepared a new firmware update. This is for Skywriter HAT Boards which are not responding to gestures/finger movement only. You can find it here: http://get.pimoroni.com/firmware-july-2016.tar.gz

  • Plug your Skywriter HAT onto your Pi
  • Copy this file onto your Pi
  • Extract with tar -xf firmware-july-2016.tar.gz
  • cd into the firmware-july-2016 directory
  • run ./update.py
  • The board should be updated, with no “FAILED” messages
  • Enjoy your, hopefully, revived Skywriter HAT
2 Likes
30

Much improvement on my side! Thank you!

31

When trying to do the firmware update, all I get is:

Starting Loader update…
Loader update failed!
Retrying…