First off, I should let you know that in terms of electronics, I would describe myself as a cautious but competent amateur, but by no means expert, and the hobby is relatively new to me - given that, here's my situation:
After years of tinkering with robotics and flying drones, I decided build my own drone, which I have done with grea success. I went with a Turnigy 9x from Hobbyking as it seemed the sensible choice given the support and upgradeability. I've had the radio working in the past and everything was okay, but having read so much about er9x and how it really unlocks the power of the 9x, I purchased a SmartiParts board, installed it, and promptly reversed the battery polarity, blowing the capacitor and regulators on the various boards. I went through many posts online on how to repair this, changing the capacitor and regulators with suitable replacements. The radio worked fine for a while, but I could never really trust it as it had a tendency to go dead, and would often take a very long time to start, and make strange ticking/bleeps.
I figured I'd cut my losses at that point and I purchased a replacement motherboard from banggood.com (Here's the part at Bangood.com) I checked that it would be compatible and was assured that it would be.
I installed the board and the radio booted up no problems. But when I checked the "display" option in the radio, I noticed that none of the sticks or pots seemed to work - the bars just didn't move. And this was confirmed when I paired the radio with the receiver and tested with servos. Absolutely nothing...
I figured I would reflash the firmware with er9x so see if that solved the problem. So... installed the SmartieParts board again (having changed the connector on my LiPo so it;s impossible to reverse the polarity again!). I decided to go with EEPE as there seemd to be the most info about this online. So I went to the er9x homepage and downloaded the latest stable er9x general version:
.First of all, I think I backed up my flash memory by clicking the radio with a green down arrow icon:
. And I saved the firmware off the device into the file attached to this post (flysky_firmware.zip). Then I flashed the er9x.hex file I downloaded by using the button with the radio and an orange burn icon (to the left of the icon shown above). I chose the correct file and it seemed to flash the firmware nice and fast, but then I got the error that "avrdude did not complete correctly, quitting with error code 1" or something similar, and there appeared to be a mismatch with what was written and what it was expecting. After a bit of googling about and reading the SmartieParts website, I added the flag "-B 11" the extra arguments field in EEPE to slow the burn process down. So, I repeat the process and everything took a little while, but it appeared to finish correctly with AVRdude reporting as such.This is where I hit the snag I'm currently at.I turn the radio on and nothing. It's like it's completely dead. No bleeps, no nothing. I wondered if it was connection issue with the screen, so I tried pairing with with the receiver. It will connect with the receiver, but as soon as I turn the radio off and on again, the pairing seems to be lost, as the receiver continues flashing until i repeat the pairing process...
I have scoured every single post that seems similar on these forums and across the internet, and tried everything I can apart from replacing the ATMega chip! Please don't think I'm posting this here without checking everything I can, looking around online. I know there's a lot of similar posts online, but I genuinely feel that this issue is not the same as the others. Voltage at the two regulators on the mother board is 5v and 3.3v when I test with a multimeter. As is voltage at the two other regulators which I replaced when I fried the radio the first time. I'm a bit scared to go mucking about with fuses and all that business, but I'd love some advice from you guys. I have tried reading the EEPROM to memory so I can change the contrast setting manually before flashing it back, but I get this error:
I have been through my temp files to locate the hex file in that error message and attached to this post (when I look at it in notepad, it doesn't look right to me, and I can't open it in EEPE). I checked the LCD ribbon connector is plugged in, and I can't see any issue there - also, the LCD was working perfectly before I flashed it. All of the switches are in the correct positions when I power on the radio.
So that's it, really. I don't think it's bricked, or that the fuses are messed up, as I can flash to and from the radio, but something isn't right here, and I'm at my wit's end! Any help would be really appreciated - I've tried to give as much detail and background as I can but if anyone can help and needs more info, then I'll happily post more.
Thank you in advance!
Well done..
