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I have a couple of questions about the Rambo card that some of you more experienced can help me with.
Can the Rambo be connected to the 12 volt power source without anything else hooked up except a USB
cable going to a PC? I don't want to damage the motor drivers by doing something stupid.

Second question, I have the Rambo connected to the PC, can I read it's firmware with the Arduino software?
I know you can upload code to it using the Arduino but can you read what's there?
Those are my questions for someone brighter than I am. Thanks!

[quote="Eaglezsoar"]I have a couple of questions about the Rambo card that some of you more experienced can help me with.
Can the Rambo be connected to the 12 volt power source without anything else hooked up except a USB
cable going to a PC? I don't want to damage the motor drivers by doing something stupid.

yes, i do this all the time when testing ideas out.

Eaglezsoar wrote:I have a couple of questions about the Rambo card that some of you more experienced can help me with.
Can the Rambo be connected to the 12 volt power source without anything else hooked up except a USB
cable going to a PC? I don't want to damage the motor drivers by doing something stupid.

Second question, I have the Rambo connected to the PC, can I read it's firmware with the Arduino software?
I know you can upload code to it using the Arduino but can you read what's there?
Those are my questions for someone brighter than I am. Thanks!

As to the second question, I do not believe there is any method in place for the board to send firmware back to the computer.

Foshon's right. The firmware is compiled before being loaded on to the board, so even if you could read it, all you'd be looking at is hexadecimal gibberish.

Not so much gibberish to some of the weirdos I know. But then again they are coder weirdos. I even knew a guy who could outright read you binary, but he was a touch autistic as well. Good coder though, very good.

Eaglezsoar wrote: Second question, I have the Rambo connected to the PC, can I read it's firmware with the Arduino software?
I know you can upload code to it using the Arduino but can you read what's there?
Those are my questions for someone brighter than I am. Thanks!

I believe (but I haven't done it) you can read the binary firmware using avrdude. avrdude is included with the Arduino software. On a Mac, it is at /Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/tools/avr/bin/avrdude. On Windows, it should be in the application directory somewhere.

The avrdude manual is here. It is not an easy program to learn.
http://www.nongnu.org/avrdude/user-manual/avrdude.html

That will get you the binary, not the source. You can't really read it, but you can save a copy in case you want to revert your firmware someday. You can also compare it to another binary file to see whether it is identical. If you've gone this far, you're probably enough of a developer to know what to do next.