Getting HxC SD to work (Amiga 500)

[bambule]

Hello everybody,

I received my SDCard HxC Floppy Emulator a few days ago, and I am trying to replace the original floppy of my Amiga 500 with it. Right now I am quite frustrated because I didn't get it to work. Any help is appreciated!

I use a Revision C-Board, however the Display says Revision B?!
Firmware Version is 1.6.0.0.

What I've done so far:
- I replaced the original floppy cable with a floppy cable from a old PC (twisted type) because the original one was too short. The red wire is located next to the "1" on the a500-board.
- The J3-setting is like it is shown in the manual in section 2.3.1 (Atari ST / Amiga / Shugart) for twisted cable (ID3).
- I suspect the SD-card I've used to be incombatible so I tried 5 different SD-Cards. (Kingston SD 2GB, SanDisk SD 512MB, Sony SDHC 4GB, takeMS microSDHC 4GB via Adapter, Canon SD 32MB) I also played around with low-level formatting (SDFormatter) and different Blocksizes (1024, 2048, etc) in the Windows 7 - format-Dialogue. I formatted always FAT32, except the tiny canon-card, there was no option to choose FAT32.
- I created HXCSDFE.CFG with HxCFloppyEmulator.exe OR I copied it from the "Floppy Emulator Manager" plus AUTOBOOT.hfe.

Here is what I get:
I start with no SD-card inserted, the display cycles through the *blabla* / No SD-Card found - stuff. The Beeper is beeping around every 2 seconds. The very left LED is on. After inserting the SD-card there is different behaviour:
Variant 1 (mostly common):
Display freezes, All three LEDs are on, Beeper is off. No changes when the SD-card is being removed, board seems to hang - I have to cycle power.
Variant 2:
Like variant 1, but after removing the SD-Card: first 2 LEDs are ON, 3rd is flashing fast, beeper sounds like a machine-gun.
Variant 3 (rare, maybe only on FAT16?):
Display cycles through: "Reading FAT.." - "HXCSDFE.CFG not found" - nothing more happens.

So - what can I do now?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

--

[Jeff]

...
I use a Revision C-Board, however the Display says Revision B?!
...
...

Seems to be a defective board.
The 3.6V regulator seems to doesn't work.
If you cannot fix it yourself (it's maybe only a solder problem...), i recommend you to contact Lotharek for a board exchange.

Have you try to only connect the power supply (without the floppy cable). Is the board working in this case ?

[bambule]

Thank you for the reply, Jeff!

Now I tried to connect just the power without the floppy cable. - I have the same behavior.
By the way, one thing I forgot to mention before: Until I insert a SD-Card, the display is very hard to read - the Matrix is quite bright.

--

[Jeff]

Thank you for the reply, Jeff!

Now I tried to connect just the power without the floppy cable. - I have the same behavior.
By the way, one thing I forgot to mention before: Until I insert a SD-Card, the display is very hard to read - the Matrix is quite bright.

--

mhh can you check your power supply voltage ? should be 5V +/-10%

[bambule]

Damn - that's the key!
All the time I had the power connector the wrong way round, so I had 12V on pin 1 instead of 5V.
Lucky I didn't toasted it, with my stupidity.

Thank you very much - It seems to work now.

[Jeff]

Damn - that's the key!
All the time I had the power connector the wrong way round, so I had 12V on pin 1 instead of 5V.
Lucky I didn't toasted it, with my stupidity.

Thank you very much - It seems to work now.

OMG...
I put some protections against this (a transil + a polyswitch...).
Not useless in this case