You will have seen my infatuation with the Si5351 developing whilst she was clothed in the Adafruit Breakout Board. I was - quite naturally - keen to undress the device and play with her in the flesh.
Fortunately, a batch of naked Si5351s arrived. Unfortunately (given my poor eyesight and cack-handedness), I had first to deal with the "terrible miscalculation of scale" and mount the bare devices on MSOP-10 to DIL carrier boards...
Credit where it is due - I had the devices MOUNTED on the carriers - thanks, Nigel and Dennis!
With objects that I could now both see and handle, I could contemplate making an operating environment for them - I chose (not surprisingly) the environment of an Arduino shield...
Here (above) you see a socket ready to receive the Si5351, a 25 MHz crystal to clock it and a level converter circuit to translate I2C signals from the Arduino UNO lurking beneath the shield to 3v3.
The level-converter circuit is - ironically - the same circuit I used to perform the same role for the earlier, much beloved, Silicon Labs RF generator (the Si570). The same circuit I have used many times in my modular level converter plug-ins. Most ironically of all, it is the same circuit her Ladyship uses on the Adafruit Si5351 Breakout board.
Yes - dear reader - underneath those big labels there are some more pieces of circuitry which I am deliberately concealing from you. It isn't time to show you yet - Pete calls this the "Fan Dance"!
I put the new Si5351s in the socket - my heart pumping slightly faster than its normal resting rate - and - nothing happened.
I tried all my code (which I knew worked, from experience with the Adafruit board). I tried all the "test" example programs (from Jason and Adafruit). Nothing.
In the end - in desperation - I tried running an I2C "scanner" program, which searches for the presence of any I2C device, and reports what it finds.
Here's what happened...
No wonder nothing was happening - the Si5351 code was anticipating a device at I2C base address of (hex) 60. Instead, the actual device appeared at 6F.
Let's be clear - this is WRONG. This is OUT OF SPEC. Here is an extract from the Data Sheet that defines what an Si5351 IS...
The extra commentary (in the red box) is from your humble servant. Our little 10-pin device only has one I2C address : 0x60. Fancier devices (with more pins) can use one of those pins to give an optional choice of 0x60 OR 0x61. But our little Si5351A is just specified to be there on 0x60. End of.
I knew that my shield with its level converter circuitry was working fine, because I could put the Adafruit Breakout board into the socket and the I2C Scanner could see the Si5351 at the correct address..,
Then - I discovered that the dodgy Si5351s would actually respond, as long as I modified the base address in the libraries to correspond to the (incorrect) 0x6F value that their hardware embodied. This is achieved easily enough in Jason, nt7s' library by an edit of one character of the si5351.h file. But it does nothing to recover the dodginess of the batch of rogue devices...
I want to use Jason's library with ALL my Si5351s - I'm not prepared to have two different versions of software "drivers" to handle some real devices (on the Adafruit boards) and some dodgy ones. This has to be about interoperability.
Finally, I got a second batch of Si5351s and had them mounted on DIL carriers. I put them into the shield and ran the scanner...
At last - the real thing!
Batch 1 came from Mouser (UK). Batch 2 came from Digi-Key.
Jason, nt7s, has previously blogged:
"it seems obvious that Mouser has some oddball parts; perhaps they were custom parts that inadvertently escaped Silicon Labs. I'm still waiting to hear back from Mouser about the issue, but in the meantime, I would recommend you order from a different distributor until they fix this problem."
The evidence above shows that parts from Mouser in the UK also display the same dodgy behaviour.
At the time of writing, Mouser have kindly agreed to refund the purchaser of the Batch 1 devices.
I can continue my romance with some pukka Si5351s.
Pukka, (for the benefit of international readers) is a informal British adjective, meaning "first class" or "genuine" and having Hindi and Urdu origin, (where it originally meant "cooked, ripe").
...-.- de m0xpd
No comments:
Post a Comment