I have built the probe that came with my Jumperless - seems to work OK, but I would like to know if there’s a quick how-to for using it efficiently. Thanks…
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Hey, so I haven’t really written good docs for that yet but I really really should.
There’s a bit of information in the GitHub release where I added it. But it’s not super helpful.
So I’m going give you a quick rundown here which will also serve as the starting point for the real guide I’ll have written soon.
The color under the logo tells you which mode you’re in:
Pink - Connect
Orange - Clear
Blue - Disambiguate
Plug the probe into the bottom 2 holes of that 4-hole header at the top left corner, labeled 18 and 19.
Make sure to set the rail supply switch directly under that header to 5V (middle) or 3.3V (bottom), if you touch +8V or -8V with the probe, it’ll blow out the internal pulldown resistor on that pin. (If you did this already and the probe doesn’t work, enter ‘d’ in the menu and select “swap probe pins” and turn the header around, you get one mulligan here)
With the probe plugged in, a short press of the button will take you to Connect mode (pink).
When you’re in Probing mode, all the connections you’ve made will be disconnected so the Jumperless can scan every row one at a time to look for the probe signal. When you leave Probing mode, it’ll connect them again.
Just tap one row and it’ll light up white, then the next row you tap will connect them together and assign them a color.
Troubleshooting note: if this works but LED on the probe doesn’t light up and it doesn’t sense rows, your Probe and Button pins are swapped. Turn the probe header around.
A long press will take you to Clear mode (orange). If you’re already in Probing mode, it will toggle between them.
This will search the bridge list for anything connected to the poked node and clear both sides of the connection. It should be pretty intuitive, but if you poke GND, it’ll go disconnect everything connected to GND, but if you poke the row that GND is connected to, it’ll just clear that one connection.
Disambiguation
If you poke something that is “shorted” (loosely, some resistance or a diode counts), the Jumperless has no way to know which one you poked, so it’ll go into Disambiguation mode.
The logo will go blue, all the connected rows will turn pink, and one of them will be much brighter than the others, that’s the selected one. Short press the button to cycle through them, and long press to select the one you meant to poke. Then it will go back to whatever mode you were in and you can carry on.
Rails
When you select a power rail (make sure the switch isn’t set to ±8V (top)), it’ll show the first 3 rows on the top and the first 5 rows on the bottom in red. One will be brighter than the other. It’s asking if you want to connect things to 5V or 3.3V.
The same selection thing applies as Disambiguation mode, short press to cycle between them, long press to select.
It’ll only ask you once and that choice is saved until a power cycle.
From then on, any time you touch the positive rails it will be the voltage you selected.
The reason it has to do all this is that the Jumperless has no way of knowing what the rail selection switch is set to.
That should cover the basics. I’ll put this all into a guide when I get some time to add pictures and stuff.
Thanks, man! I really appreciate this! I think this device will be super helpful.
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