Hello all. I went through the Swan Quickstart Tutorial Swan Quickstart - Blues Wireless Developers using VS Code and PlatformIO. It’s actually a great tutorial, but can I make a suggestion for idiot-proofing it further? Because I spent a lot of time trying to debug a problem because I was being an idiot.
Where it says to plug in the Swan, can I suggest making it clear that it means the little device on top, and not the Notecarrier? Maybe I’m particularly stupid, but I don’t think so, and other people might forget or not understand, plug into the Notecarrier and wonder why nothing is happening. To a newbie like myself, the two things are like one unit and I didn’t think of plugging into that socket.
Other than that, great stuff.
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This is good feedback, thanks!
Rob
I was looking for a place to provide my feedback on the Blues Starter Kit for North America page and this feedback from @TimAlmond feels right
Here is the picture of my starter kit, fully assembled:
Image 1
This needs to matched with the image on the Swan page below
Image 2
I labelled the “matching part” with numbers 1, 2 and 3 and the number 4 references the connector for USB cable to my computer (NoteBook Pro). From my initial reading it was not clear whether this connector is a part of Notecarrier (1) or Swan (3) (I think that it is the Swan.
The other slightly confusing issue is the parts of the Starter Kit are not rendered in proportion to the Notecarrier. This, together with the fact that the kit ships with the Swan mounted on the Notecarrier (see Image 1) made me think for while.
Lastly the page introducing SWD Programmer & Debugger may benefit from more explanations (in addition to
The STLINK-V3MINI is a stand-alone debugging and programming mini probe for STM32 microcontrollers, like the Swan! Use the JTAG/SWD interfaces to connect to the Swan via its onboard connector for simple programming or debugging.
I have no idea where to stick this component (Notecarrier?) nor whether I need it to enable debugging from VSCode.
Ok so I had the opposite interaction. I setup the note carrier f with the notecard and setup an account, I was moving along good until I printed a case for the complete unit, the swan card attached. The 3d printed case only has the slot to attach to the swan. All of the sudden I was not getting any response from the notecard but was getting results from notehub. My request {“req”:“card.version”} resulted in {“req”:“card.version”}???. Creating a hole in the new case so I could connect directly to the carrier F brought the Browser terminal communication to the notecard back to life. When connected to the swan card I was getting the swan information. I realize this is the method to develop with but I’m not there yet
Hi @jensenjim and welcome to the Blues Wireless community!
A good rule of thumb going forward is: if you’re trying to communicate directly with the Notecard, plug your USB cable into the Notecarrier. If you’re trying to communicate (program) the Swan (or other MCU host), plug your USB cable into that host.
I’d recommend with any printed case to leave gaps to connect to any/all of the available ports.
Thanks,
Rob
