Arduino Serial Monitor "no notecard"

Troubleshooting
1

I’m trying to connect from an Arduino Uno R3 to a Qwiic Notecarrier for the first time, and I keep getting a Serial Monitor response that says “no notecard”

I’m not sure where this response comes from, or what’s causing it. Any help would be appreciated.

#include <Notecard.h>
#include <SoftwareSerial.h> // Load a library to communicate serially over digital arduino pins
#define usbSerial Serial // Assigns the Serial Monitor port (USB) to variable usbSerial
SoftwareSerial txRxPinsSerial (2,3);
#define productUID “XXXX” // Assigns the notecard UID to variable product UID
Notecard notecard; // Declares a global object to respresent the Notecard

void setup(void) {
// put your setup code here, to run once:

usbSerial.begin(115200);
while(!usbSerial)
{
; //wait for serial port to connect. Needed for native USB
}
usbSerial.println(“Starting…”); // prints to Serial Monitor to indicate connection starting

notecard.begin(txRxPinsSerial, 9600);
notecard.setDebugOutputStream(usbSerial);

J *req = notecard.newRequest(“hub.set”);
// hub.set assigns a product UID to the Notecard
if (req != NULL) {
// if the req is not equal to 0 (it shouldn’t be, we just assigned it “hub.set”)
JAddStringToObject(req, “product”, productUID);
JAddStringToObject(req, “mode”, “continuous”);
notecard.sendRequest(req); // sends the now complete request to notecard
}

}

2

Hey @rfadell3,

Welcome to the Blues community!

Could you share a picture of your hardware setup so we can see how you have everything connected?

Thanks,
TJ

3

Hi TJ,

Thanks for the quick reply. Here’s a pic of the Notecarrier and Arduino connections.

It was only letting me attach one pic, so I tried getting all the connections here. Let me know if I should provide anything else.

IMG-7018
IMG-70181920×2560 505 KB

4

Hey @rfadell3,

That error means that the note-arduino library is trying to connect to a Notecard, and it’s not able to find it.

The error usually means there’s either an issue with your wiring, or how you’re initializing the Notecard with notecard.begin().

At a glance nothing obviously wrong is jumping out at me. I’d recommend checking out this section of the docs: Arduino Library - Blues Wireless Developers. And then also looking over this sample, which has a bunch of comments on what each of these lines of code are doing that you might find useful for debugging: note-arduino/Example1_NotecardBasics.ino at master · blues/note-arduino · GitHub.

TJ

5

FYI I couldn’t get Software Serial working on my Arduino either for the notecard. If you do a test without software serial (ie connecting to rx/tx pins and skipping usb debugging serial) I’d bet you’d see it show in your notehub dashboard as synced. All my googling basically said “software serial doesn’t always work with everything”, so I gave up.

I ended up switching to an MCU that has multiple hardware serial ports.

1 Like
6

Hi Abari,

That’s great news, I had already ordered a new MCU for that exact reason, so it’s good to know that Software Serial was likely the issue. Excited to try with the new board. Thanks for the help.