At last, I am back from my working holidays and getting back on the project. Before I went on holidays, I ran into an apparent power related issue where the laser was not switched on until a USB cable was also plugged into the Hicat Livera. The Hicat Motor Driver board specs says it can accept input voltage of 5-12V. I was using 5V input when I experienced the problem. I switched to use 12V and the problem goes away.

I was eager to find out whether having sufficient power now will also allow the use of Wifi AD mode (Hicat's way of saying connecting to one's home wireless router) which I never got it to work before. I used the webapp to switch to AD mode. It did not work but according to my home router, it did get an IP address from it. I could not use the webapp or telnet to access it via the new IP address. When I ran into this problem previously, I could rely on the wifi reset RST-PCB switch to set it back to AP mode. This time I could not because the boot process appears to be having problem (red led on). I powered off and on many times without ever able to recover from it. In fact, the unsuccessful switching to AD mode bricked the Hicat Livera. So far, I was not able to unbrick it. I shall try again. The worst case is that I have to get a second Hicat Livera unit to continue with the project.

If you've run into this Hicat problem before and were able to recover from it, please let me know how.