First I’d like to just say WOW! I’ve been using the TinyG for over a year now and it has been pushing strong. Until last week… when I messed everything up. I built an enclosure for my power supply and the TinyG just to kind of clean things up around my Shapeoko 2 it’s currently driving. The enclosure (in my opinion) looks great and I was ready to power up the machine to continue the job I was doing. Only this time there was something wrong. I noticed that only the blue light on the board was on. The red blinking light never started blinking. I didn’t think anything of it because my computer recognized the board so I thought everything was okay. I load up a stock piece of wood, the code, and I press play (using Chilipeppr). Only this time, no response. I try resetting the board only to find the same results.
I didn’t know what this meant so I went to the Synthetos forums, where there are A LOT of knowledgeable people willing to help out. After sifting through some posts I came to the conclusion that I somehow shorted the board somewhere and I was pretty much out of luck. Or I somehow erased the bootloader, which if I could do that just by touching a board I would have some serious problems.
This is when I started to look for a replacement TinyG on the internet, only to find that there aren’t too many suppliers that carry the TinyG, and none that carry it in a store close to me, and I live in New York City. So for my last ditch effort I decided to send Synthetos an email through their contact me section of their website. Within the hour I received a response from @Riley_Porter_ril3y eager to help (mind you this was a Sunday afternoon and he responded within the hour!). We emailed a few times back and forth until we realized this would be much faster through a phone call. He gave me a call and we started to diagnose the problem. He was having me run all of these tests to see which pin might have shorted. He’s extremely knowledgeable.
After about a half hour on the phone we couldn’t diagnose the problem so he gave me an address to ship the board to him so he can check it out. Within a week I received a working board and was able to continue my job.
I normally refrain from calling companies up for technical help (maybe that’s the “I don’t need to ask for directions” part of me talking) but this time I’m glad that I did. This was one of the best customer service experiences I’ve ever had. It really shows the professionalism and commitment to not only their product, but to their customers.
I have a few more projects I plan on needing a motion controller for, and you can bet that I will be using a TinyG.
Thank you guys for everything!
Thanks to the community as a whole for all the help! We have some really big news coming out shortly!