Vista won't open V5.2.0

I have purchased a few Picaxe microcontrollers (and programming PCB ) from sparkfun electronics, and they have just been shipped today , and I want to use this time to get ready for my new toys!

But...

I used AOL9.0VR web browser to download picaxe "Programming Editor v5.2.0 install exe (full version, approx. 32MB)" {actually 3.2MB I think} and put it in a convenient folder on my hard drive.

Now, when I double-click the icon(ie try to run it as administrator) with windows vista home basic (Microsoft is garbage), a window pops up that says:
"Error reading setup initialization file"
And an OK button. [of course it's NOT OK! But I have to push the button anyway.]
I've tried running the Program Compatibility Wizard (to make Vista behave with certain programs by acting like a previous version), and tried all sorts of settings: Fewer colors, regular menus without flashy fade-ins, lower screen resolution, etc.

Nothing works. *Sigh*

I'd really like to be able to use genuine Picaxe.com software. No third party stuff, unless if I have to.
Any help that can be thrown at my thick skull would be greatly appreciated(not to mention read)

I'm terribly sorry if this question has been posted (and solved) already.

If your BAS805.EXE file is only 3.2MB then that's your problem, a corrupt and truncated download. It should be in the region of 30MB. Try downloading the file again, maybe try a more mainstream browser if you still have problems.

I installed 5.2.0 onto a Vista Home Premium laptop a couple of days ago and had no problems whatsoever, others here are also using Vista.

Main stream Browser... Such as Internet explorer(yes, I have it)? I'll try it right now.

Yay!

It worked! It worked! Thank you much much.
I've successfully downloaded, installed and simulated the following program:

main: do
high 1
wait 1
low 1
wait 1
loop

[Flash an LED... a classic!]

Now, all I need to do is tap my foot a little harder, waiting for my shipment to arive.

PS: Not sure if the Picaxe PDF manual told me, but does wait 1 = wait 1 second or milisecond? And do I need to specify what microcontroller I'm using?

Welcome to the wonderful world of PICAXE.

Now it's up and running I'm sure you'll have lots of fun. While waiting for bits to arrive it's a good time to read through the Manuals ( Menu Bar -> Help ). There's a lot of stuff there so don't expect to absorb it all in one sitting. Dive in and out, flit about and you'll start to get a good feel for things.

Wait has its time in seconds, Pause has its time in milliseconds, so "Wait 1" and "Pause 1000" are equivalent - also take a look at Nap and Sleep while you're in Manual 2.

Selecting the PICAXE you're using is done through Menu Bar -> Options or by putting a "#picaxe" directive at the top of your source code.

Recommend you put the
#PICAXE 28X1
directive (or whatever chip you are using) at the top of every program. This tells the programmer & simulator what you are designing for rather than it defaulting to the last chip used.

{this was supposed to be posted a day before}

Thanks for the additional help, but I've just taken a look through the first two manuals (took me a bit to find them).
I'm getting two 08m's(8m and 8m...m&m, get it?), one 14-pin(forgot the last character), and one 40X1.
The two little ones are to get me started, to get comfortable programming this tiny, unthreatening, friendly looking chip. (8-pin DIP looks friendly to me because I'm a fan of the LM386, LM555, and others), (I've already programmed in Javascript, PBasic, and a bit of C++, but I've only used PBasic on microcontrollers and I'm rusty), I plan on using these two little guys in an intelligent remote control application, possiby using the IR in and out commands.
Why such a demeaning task for these{not that I dislike them}? Why not on a robot?!?
80 lines of code for memory and 5 I/O lines. Granted, I don't see myself writing more than 40 lines of code in five years, but five pins? Lets see.
Three pins for motor control (two direction pins and an enable), which leaves two for sensory input.
Or, two constantly PWMing outputs for both motors, and three sensor inputs. Still not quite enough.
But that's where the 14 pin PICAXE comes in. Plenty of I/O, no Xtal required, and enough memory to keep the cows from coming home. This medium guy is gonna do the gruntwork of my robot projects. Most likely, this dude can easily handle an average carpet-rover.(carpets must be fun to roam. So that's why human babies crawl on carpets so much that they are called rug rats.)
Now, after I've become familiar with the medium sized one, and have some PICAXE programming experience under my belt(in my stomach, I think), I'll use the honkin' 40 pin monster for any macho robots that I need some serious I/O on. Or, I'll just use it to intimidate the other robots on line-following day, heh heh.
Oh, and here's an updated LED flashing program[simulated to cyber perfection, and yes, I spent forever making it colorful]:
#picaxe 08M
symbol myvoice = 0 'Leg 7 aka serial out
symbol myled = 2 'Leg 5 aka input or output
symbol myinput = 3 'Leg 4 aka input only
main:
output myled 'set the LED control pin as an output
input myinput 'set the button input pin as, well, duh, an input
DO
reverse myled 'LED on
pause 500 'Stop for a half second
if pin3 = 0 then exit
'pin3 = myinput. Compiler wouldn't take the symbol....
'Respond to some external user input
'(a button) by stopping the flashing
Loop 'of the LED, then move on to make noise!
pulsout myvoice, 200 'if button was pushed, send sound pulses out
pause 1000 'wait a bit (one second to be exact)
goto main 'loop back to where we started

Hmmmmm.....

I got my chips today! I assembled the 08m protoboard kit thing right out of the box(only after reading the instructions twice), and minutes later(I've soldered lots of times), the whole PCB was assembled, along with my own modifications (a three pin header instead of a tempting 9v batt. clip to get power from an external 5V power supply regulator, a couple of extra smoothing capacitors, a row of female headers to easily interface my breadboard and picaxe in-circuit).

Once that was done, I plugged my serial programming cacle to the USB to DB-9 that I had previously bought on ebay to program my Basic stamp Homework board.

After wrestling with COM numbers for a couple of minutes, I shortened the above program to a loop that inverted the output, waited half a second, then looped again (this simpler program was less likely to contain bugs, plus I was too impatient to set up a speaker amplifying and push button circuit, I wanted to see the thing work).
After hooking up a series equivalent 3.2k resistor between 5V+ and software pin 1 and hooking up the download cable...
Nothing hapened!...






...








...








...










...









...Until the progress bar filled up and finished downloading the program. I then had that LED blinking safely under software control!
Most of the ease of the basic stamp(dumb AVRs require too much babysitting---don't tell avrfreaks.net I said that!), acceptable speed (fast enough to blink an LED is good enough for me), and only a fraction of the cost of a full Basic stamp with onboard power regulator and program interpreter! Even though an on-chip software interpreter is an inefficient way to go, and considering the alternatives... I think I'm starting to like these PICAXE's

If y'all nag me enough to, I'll take pictures of my programming setup and/or modifications to my board, and either post them here, or post a link to them.

[PS: Sorry to leave you hanging there for a second--I just had to have some kind of suspense]

Happy that you are happy - welcome aboard!

Perhaps you could shorten that great blank space - nearly didn't see the end of your message!

BCJ, it was for artistic impact / dramatic effect.

I thought the post had stopped and only noticed the rest of it on my second visit and then it took so long to scroll down that I'd forgotten the first part of the posting.

If the pictures are as big as that gap please don't post them on my account

Dippy said:

BCJ, it was for artistic impact / dramatic effect.

I thought the post had stopped and only noticed the rest of it on my second visit and then it took so long to scroll down that I'd forgotten the first part of the posting.

If the pictures are as big as that gap please don't post them on my account

Click to expand...

I wanted a large enough blank space to make you think that the post stopped, then scroll down maybe 1/4 screen (but not too far) to read the happy ending, but I misjudged the distance required. Whoops! Oh well. I'll take a bit out to keep the dramatic, climactic, killer cliffhanger, while also keeping people from thinking that the forum thread ends there.

PS: How fast where you scrolling?

There. I've taken out half of the space, and added a few ellipses(spl?) that keep you scrolling down. Heh, heh.

I have taken my 08M proto-board and connected it to my 14M(on a breadboard) using varyingly devious and devilish tricks to connects those wires where they were supposed to connect.


For the serial in, I attached an alligator clip to a thin component lead, and stuck it in the DIP socket.

For GND, I used the multi-pin header I soldered previously, meant for conecting to 08M's pins. These female headers are the perfect size for accepting breadboard wire!

Now, for the serial out, get this, I used the jumper thing meant for shorting two pins of a male header, connected one half of it to to serial out of the PCB, and on the other side, I left it hanging. There, I used breadboard wire. The shorting jumper was used as a male-to-male adapter.

After a few minutes of fiddling with pinouts and COM ports (again), I loaded up a simple program that reads the value of an ADC, and sends it to the computer via debug command for viewing.

#picaxe 14M
'Read analog to digital converter, and tell the computer what is seen there

main:
readadc 0, b0 'get data for transmission through delta quadrant
debug b0 'tell us what is seen at physical pin 7 of the IC
wait 1 'wait a picaxe second!
goto main 'loop back to start



And it worked! Yay for PICAXE intercompatibility! [$0.50 word for the day]
Oh, and I got it to where I got a fast refresh rate by taking out the wait command.

Next improvement to do to that board is to attach another three pin male header (serial in, serial out, GND) to allow much easier (and reliable) programming of other PICAXE's (the shorting jumper kept falling out, terminating my serial out connection to the computer).


PS: I only colored out the green to make the code easier to read. The rest of the colors are not worth the bother.

How fast was I scrolling?

Well, I use one of those cordless Logitech Mice with the spinnable/flywheel type scrollwheels where you can give it a good wazz to scroll quickly. I span it at 6000rpm and it took three seconds to get to the bottom of your post.
Not really

But at first glance it did look like the Forum page had gone funny.
But, hey, not all dramatic effects work on TV either.

It was an experiment. I'd never tried doing lots of spaces before.
I imagine it could be thousands, or millions, of spaces long, long enough to crash the RAM on any computer running Vista.

Hmmm.... The Vista Detector.
I like the sound of that!

Now that my picaxe system is working, I've got a few projects in mind I've wanted to do.
I just need to wait for a design to crystallize(spl?).

Don't worry, I'll think of something....

PS: Hardly anyone's ben replying to me in this thread. Is it fizzling out?

Not that anyone will ever notice this post, but, wow, it's been almost a year since I've played withh my picaxes, or visited this forum.

I just wanted to leave a quick note that (after trying, failing, leaving it alone for six months, then trying again) I have finally managed to download and run an LED flashing program on my 40X1.

On my first try, I feared I had burned the chip out by putting the regulated 5v on a wrong pin. (I was breadboarding the circuit with the programming adapter on a seaparate board)

Six months later, I came back, counted the pins to V+ and GND connections, then triple-checked them. (hey, that many pins makes me dizzy)
I hooked up, then re-hooked up the programming board, then tied the reset pin to V+ with the reccommended 4k7 resistor. After that, I put an LED (through a 1k resstor) on output 7 (top right corner).

Finally, I stuffed as many capacitors as I could on the power connections (both sets of power wires are next to each other; awesome for decoupling!), and downloaded the program, eing careful to set everything to the correct COM port, 4MHz internal frequency, 40x1 programming mode, etc.

It downloaded, and that LED is flashing right now. Well, the right now refers to the time at which I am writing this post.

I've started down the long road to taming the 40x1 beast!

Excellent. Well done.

"PS: Hardly anyone's ben replying to me in this thread. Is it fizzling out?"
- well, I think that after a year with no replies you can consider it fizzled

(I don't think anyone knew what to say as most download problems are a user-issue, but your example shows that persistence usually wins through)

Unit042 said:

Now that my picaxe system is working, I've got a few projects in mind I've wanted to do.
I just need to wait for a design to crystallize(spl?).

Don't worry, I'll think of something....

PS: Hardly anyone's ben replying to me in this thread. Is it fizzling out?

Click to expand...

You had a problem, it's now solved. Great, well done.
What else would you like anyone else to say about it?