1 # Why won't my computer talk to my Altus Metrum product?
3 Make sure you have a battery and power switch attached, and when you turn
4 on the power switch, the board beeps at you. If not, resolve that
5 first. Note that some products like TeleGPS don't have a beeper, or need
6 a switch attached, but you always need a battery attached to power up the
7 board... a USB cable alone is not sufficient!
9 You need to have our software installed, you can find the
10 [free download here](../AltOS).
12 Plug a USB cable into the board and your computer.
14 The next step is to get the board into the right mode. For flight computers
15 with an accelerometer, you need to power up the board in a not-nose-up
16 orientation. For products like EasyMini that do not have an accelerometer,
17 you need to have the USB cable attached to the board at power up to let it
18 know you want to talk to it from your computer instead of going in to pad
21 Your computer should "see" the board once it powers up and beeps out the
22 battery voltage and then two "dits" (Morse code I) indicating that it's
23 entering idle/interactive mode, followed by the pyro continuity beeps
24 one time only. At that point, you should be able to configure it from our
25 software, etc. If, instead, you hear 'di dah dah dit' (Morse code P) and
26 the continuity beeps repeat every few seconds, the board is in pad mode and
27 you won't be able to talk to it.
29 By FAR the biggest problem we see are folks trying to use micro USB
30 cables that don't have all the pins connected. Apparently, lots of
31 cables shipped these days for battery charging only have the power and
32 ground pins and just can't be used for actual USB data transfer. We
33 [sell a cable](https://shop.gag.com/parts/usb-a-to-micro-b-cable.html)
34 that we know works if you can't find one locally.
36 Don't be afraid to try several USB cables until you find one that works!
projects / web / altusmetrum / blob