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Cable Wires Kit

K8048 'Not Found on com1' Error When Using Velleman Pic Programmer and Experimentation Kit

Having had difficulty in successfully connecting my Velleman K8048 Pic Pragramming and experimentation board to my computer using a serial cable, I found, on the web many other accounts of people having similar problems. Most of the insights that I found were spread across a number of websites, blogs etc. often with conflicting information. Eventually I managed to make the board communicate successfully and found, like most people, that the problem was of my own making. I hope that this article may help some of you that are having similar problems.

The kit that I purchased was the one K8048 (sometimes referred to as the P8048) Pic Pragramming and experimentation Kit; it is the kit which needs to be assembled by the user. The kit comes with all the components needed to make a male to female 9 pin serial cable - one end connects to the board and one end to the computer.

I first made up the board and then attempted to make up the cable using a length of monitor cable that I no longer needed (it had enough individual wires in it to attach to the required pins). I quickly found that this is pretty much impossible unless you have clamps to hold the cable or the terminator while you are soldering, so I decided to buy a ready made serial cable.

Mistakenly, I purchased a male to female cable as I could not remember the correct configuration of the cable ends supplied. Once I realised my mistake, I figured that I could use one of the ends supplied with the kit as an adapter - the pins sticking out of one of the male ends fit snugly into the open sockets on the back of the supplied female end. This results in the top left pin on one end being connected to the top left pin of the other end and so on; as all the bulletin board posts emphasize that the cable need to be wired 'straight through' I thought that this would work ok as to my mind top left to top left, second left to second left, top right to top right etc. to my mind is straight through.

As you might guess, it did not work - I kept getting '8048 not found at com1' messages - posts on bulletin boards suggested checking for conflicts, problems with serial connectors that are mounted on the mother board, dodgy soldering, low voltage power supplies and numerous other suggestions.

In the end I realised that a male to male serial cable is wired up as I had done but in a male to female serial cable the ends are a mirror image so top left is wired to top right, bottom left to bottom right, or in other words pin1 to pin1, pin 2 to pin 2 etc as the instructions say! Once I did this it worked perfectly every time.

In my next arcticle I will describe how I fixed my own boiler and now have hot water coming out of the fridge.

About the Author

Matt Theobald has been working in the exhibition and display industry for over 20 years. Having been involved in the design and build of exhibition stands throughout Europe and having specialised for a number of years in
large-format digital print
he has a wealth of experience in this arena.