Wasp fails to initiate?

[xy007]

So I was testing my rev c board that has a mega drive v5 soldered to it with a wasp but every time I boot the gc it freezes and doesn't spin to the gc menu. Is there any solutions to this? I am almost absolutely sure it is not the wasp, since I have been testing it on another cube and it works just fine.

some info: When I power on the game cube the blue led flashes just for a instant, I have triple checked the connections between the megadrive and gc mobo with the filters multiple times.

In some of the trouble shooting that I have done today I have found this strange effect. If the wasp does initiate on this specific board and I launch swiss, it does not show the games on the sd card. I could only get it to initiate about 2-3 times today out of 500000000000000000 tries.

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Solution

TL;DR: Check your grounds.

So I triple double checked every connection, then I thought: I wonder if the wasp is getting a solid GND. Apparently the mega drive v5 gets the GND through these two pins:

Something I thought I would never check, so by some random miracle I thought let me check those to see if there is a ground connects through that, sure enough it does.
So I just added a extra wire for now just to test and it works just fine now:

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Edit: it is a cpu60

Could it be the actual megadrive (ffc connector?)

Edit: Are cpu10's compatible with the wasp? I have the original mobo I was going to use and a spare mega drive that I can use if I can't solve my current problem.

 

[Blargaman91]

All GameCubes are compatible with the Wiikey Fusion or Wasp as long as it has Swiss. Yours should unless didn't order it from megalomaniac. Check that the FFC is inserted correctly and that the FFC even works. Several of mine have broken while appearing fine on the outside. If that's the same FFC you were using on the other GC then it should be fine.

 

[xy007]

All GameCubes are compatible with the Wiikey Fusion or Wasp as long as it has Swiss. Yours should unless didn't order it from megalomaniac. Check that the FFC is inserted correctly and that the FFC even works. Several of mine have broken while appearing fine on the outside. If that's the same FFC you were using on the other GC then it should be fine.

Yeah I used the same ffc cable on the other gc and it worked just fine. I tried about every thing you could think of, switching ffc cables, re-inserting it, the cable in between wasp and sd card even switching sd card holders.....

 

[megalomaniac]

just in case no one has been paying attention to my twitter account:

https://twitter.com/BadAssConsoles/status/618232232256212992

 

[Blargaman91]

I'm confused. What is the cause of the Wiikey hanging at that screen? Whenever it's happened to me I just rewired.

 

[xy007]

just in case no one has been paying attention to my twitter account:

https://twitter.com/BadAssConsoles/status/618232232256212992

The weird thing is mine was hanging like that last week, then working just fine this week. But that's not my current problem. My cube fails to get past the gc emblem screen when first launching.

 

[megalomaniac]

I'm confused. What is the cause of the Wiikey hanging at that screen? Whenever it's happened to me I just rewired.

This is true...a wire related problem can cause this also, but when its not a wire related problem then its the WKF/WASP itself...

ive been doing a lot of testing lately to determine the cause.
I have concluded it to be hardware related to the WKF/WASP FPGA itself.
Since the code is closed source i cannot perform other validation tests to isolate the root cause. However, after lots of trial and error, i have deduced the cause to a possible theory of an FPGA timing related initialization failure that affects only a handful of FPGAs....

If a simple hardware workaround was possible i would have continued the investigation to find a hardware fix but also realized this might be out of the capabilities of some people who might be affected by it...Instead, I thought a software fix would be the best solution for everyone.

The freeze was noted to happen when using both original firmware and swiss so I assume the WKF team did not come across this FPGA bug either in their testing trials. Using swiss i began to debug the start up initialization for WKF/WASP and found a simple work around to add improved initialization to prevent freezing on those affected FPGAs.

This new startup initialization was validated against emu_kidid's latest code changes and further local testing was performed to ensure the latest code does indeed 100% compensate for the FPGA bug.


In a nutshell:
swiss now adds support to prevent any WKF/WASP affected by the FPGA bug from freezing upon initialization.
however, swiss cannot help prevent freeze due to wiring, connectivity, or damaged FPGA.

The weird thing is mine was hanging like that last week, then working just fine this week. But that's not my current problem. My cube fails to get past the gc emblem screen when first launching.

take a look again for soldering issues connecting v5 to your mainboard.
ive also had a possible bad solder joint when installing v5 in a hurry onto a mainboard....
i didnt even bother to look for a bad solder joint...i just re-wet all the solder points since it was faster than probing for a bad connection...no problems afterwards..worked as it should and only took a couple of extra minutes...

 

[xy007]

Solution

TL;DR: Check your grounds.

So I triple double checked every connection, then I thought: I wonder if the wasp is getting a solid GND. Apparently the mega drive v5 gets the GND through these two pins:

(imgur down will add picture later)

Something I thought I would never check, so by some random miracle I thought let me check those to see if there is a ground connects through that, sure enough it does.
So I just added a extra wire for now just to test and it works just fine now:

(imgur down will add picture later)