J MG

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10 years, 2 months ago.

brand new arch pro won't work on linux or osx

I have just bought an arch pro, the "Arch Pro" disk mounts when i plug in the usb port, but it won't let me copy any files from the mbed compiler to the disk. It says not enough space.

df -h on both operating system lists "Arch Pro" as 2Kb in size, with 512 bytes free space?

So far i am very unimpressed, any ideas on how to get it working?

Question relating to:

Last updated: 27 Aug 2020
Arch Pro, an mbed enabled development board for rapid prototyping.

2 Answers

Paul Griffith
10 years, 2 months ago.

Hi J MG,

I too have just bought an Arch Pro and like you have discovered that my Mac (running OS X 10.8.5) does not see the board. However, I have had some success getting it to work.

It seems that the mbed interface firmware shipped with the board does not work with OS X. You need to update this firmware and you need to do this from a Windows machine.

Firstly, have a look at the following article: mbed.org/users/seeed/notebook/the-mbed-interface-of-arch-pro/. This article describes how the Arch Pro mbed interface works. It describes how to update the LPC11U35 firmware and gives a link on where to get the latest firmware.

Secondly, have a look at the following thread from the Seeed Studio forum: http://www.seeedstudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=5003&hilit=Arch+Pro&start=0. The interesting stuff is at the end of the thread on page 2.

I followed the procedure outlined by Haikowick including downloading a simple blinky LED program into the LPC1768. OS X then saw the board and I was able to download other programs into it.

Don't worry if the LED behaviour looks strange - on the Arch Pro the LEDs are wired to 3.3V whereas on mbed they are wired to GND!

BTW, for downloading you need to use the USB connector nearest to the Reset button.

The problem is the virtual serial port. This appears to work but in fact locks up after outputting a couple of lines. Worse still, the mbed drive then unmounts after about 20 seconds. It re-appears after power cycling the Arch Pro, but you cannot download to it. Back to the Windows XP laptop to download a program that does not use the serial port. The board is then visible to OS X again.

I'm not sure where to go from here. I don't want to lose the serial debug port, but I could route it to another LPC1768 UART and then use an FTDI cable to connect to the Mac. This way it wouldn't go through the mbed interface chip. Another possibility is to run XP in a virtual machine on the Mac and do the downloading from there. Perhaps Seeed have some ideas?

Hope this helps!

I just found the following item on Github. UART transfer may break USB/MSD connection on OS X #54

The link is: https://github.com/mbedmicro/CMSIS-DAP/issues/54

posted by Paul Griffith 01 Sep 2014
Yihui Xiong
10 years, 2 months ago.

Please try another USB port of the Arch Pro. The USB port near the button is for flashing new program. Sorry to confuse you.

If the Arch Pro board doesn't work on Mac OS X, please update the firmware of the Arch Pro by following the guide - http://mbed.org/platforms/Seeeduino-Arch-Pro/#update-or-restore-firmware

I can confirm that the new firmware (v0203) fixes the virtual serial port problem. I have run it flat out at 115200 baud for several hours without any problems.

Thanks to Yihui for a quick resolution of the problem.

posted by Paul Griffith 04 Sep 2014