I bought two blinkstick pros in parts and soldered them together myself, but I never could get one of them to work: when I plug it in, Windows says that the USB device malfunctioned.
Any ideas what may be wrong and how I might solve this?
Would you be able to me pictures of both sides of the malfunctioning BlinkStick?
1 Like
“Sorry, new users can not upload images.” :S
Sorry about that. You should be able to upload images now.
You may notice that the large cap is not the original: that one was crushed in transit, but since I had enough to spare, I used one of my own rather than report it. It should be good (10uF, 50V)
Oh, sorry about that crushed cap. Will definitely look into improving the packaging. Did you try swapping the ATTiny85 chips? I would be able to know whether there is something wrong with the ATTiny85 or other components. Also, if you look at the USB connector, can you see all the pins inside it?
P.S. You soldering looks great! Can’t see anything wrong in the assembly.
I’ve build my only other blinkstick into the dioder casing and I’m hesitant to open it and potentially break it (they weren’t designed to be opened and closed frequently :). Once I get my latest order, I can swap the chips to see if that’s the problem.
The USB connector looks right.
I got my third BlinkStick today and it had the same problem.
So, I unplugged a working BlinkStick from another USB port and tested the new one on that port: it worked!? …maybe the problem is in the USB port, not the BlinkStick?
To test, I connected the problematic BlinkStick to that USB port and it worked as well. It seemed the USB port was the problem, but no other device had ever complained about it and I use it quite frequently.
Out of curiosity, I connected the new and the problematic BlinkStick to the original USB port again, and now they both worked there as well… sigh, classic Heisenbug.
Should anyone else have this issue: try connecting to another USB port first.
Thanks for letting me know 