EEPROM ERROR (and worse) on Rev1 FlySky9x
Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 3:42 pm
So I have Rev 1 FlySky9x (with the solder pad in the wrong spot). I tried loading er9x last night with a friend that has done it twice before. He has one transmitter with a Smarty Parts board and another with soldered on connections. He used an arduino to program his, but I was using and avr programmer.
We had some intial problems getting the eepe to read anything - but apparently this is normal. Once we opted to backup the firmware and write it to a file, it seemed to work just fine.
But we couldn't write/update the firmware from the .hex file that we downloaded. It would fail around line 128 or 129. We could however write the backup file back onto the Tx without a problem. The difference being that the backup file had a .bin extension and the downloaded file had a .hex extension. So I renamed the file to er9x.bin and was able to write to the Tx!!
But I now the transmitter beeped with one long continuous beep and displayed "EEPROM ERROR" on the screen. (Yes it beeped be as soon as it finished because the transmitter had both battery power and the power switch on during the update - we discovered neither was necessary later) I was once again able to reload the original firmware from the backup and the Tx was back in it's original state with no problems. At least this was good.
I tried several different builds of ER9x and even TH9x just to see if something would "take". No luck.
Searching the forums I found that apprarently you have to press any button when you get that error the very first time you switch to er9x ( but my transmitter doesnt' have an "any button" on it But no button was able to clear that error. I tried holding buttons as I turned the transmitter on and discovered that holding the exit button while powering up would display "RESTORE..." (and that blasted beep of course). And I see that message powering up while holding "EXIT" whether its er9x or the original firmware that is loaded.
At one point in my cycle of trying a particular firmware or rolling back to factory, I notice that with the original factory firmware the Menu button wasn't working. But I checked the switch (actually both menu and exit) with a meter and it was fine. After a couple more cycles of updating an rolling back, I though I finally had it because there was no beeping or message when I turned it on... But there was NOTHING. Blank screen, no response to buttons. And the best part - when I rolled back to the original factory firmware, I got the same thing. That's a fairly brick like behavior.
That was all late last night/early this morning and I had to go into work today so I'll need to check my next theory this afternoon... I know that towards the end I tried some of the other read/write operations and I'm really hopeful that I just managed to mix something up (used the wrong read operation to write a corrupt firmware to the file i then tried to load). Lots of clicking in the same file names, so it's possible I just need to fetch the firmware again (both er9x and factory) and try to reload those again (only to back is the same boat I was before - but that's better than bricked).
I did read something on the forum about fuses and eeprom not getting over written. Or the avr programmer having a switch to overwrite the eeprom - is that perhaps not right?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
We had some intial problems getting the eepe to read anything - but apparently this is normal. Once we opted to backup the firmware and write it to a file, it seemed to work just fine.
But we couldn't write/update the firmware from the .hex file that we downloaded. It would fail around line 128 or 129. We could however write the backup file back onto the Tx without a problem. The difference being that the backup file had a .bin extension and the downloaded file had a .hex extension. So I renamed the file to er9x.bin and was able to write to the Tx!!
But I now the transmitter beeped with one long continuous beep and displayed "EEPROM ERROR" on the screen. (Yes it beeped be as soon as it finished because the transmitter had both battery power and the power switch on during the update - we discovered neither was necessary later) I was once again able to reload the original firmware from the backup and the Tx was back in it's original state with no problems. At least this was good.
I tried several different builds of ER9x and even TH9x just to see if something would "take". No luck.
Searching the forums I found that apprarently you have to press any button when you get that error the very first time you switch to er9x ( but my transmitter doesnt' have an "any button" on it But no button was able to clear that error. I tried holding buttons as I turned the transmitter on and discovered that holding the exit button while powering up would display "RESTORE..." (and that blasted beep of course). And I see that message powering up while holding "EXIT" whether its er9x or the original firmware that is loaded.
At one point in my cycle of trying a particular firmware or rolling back to factory, I notice that with the original factory firmware the Menu button wasn't working. But I checked the switch (actually both menu and exit) with a meter and it was fine. After a couple more cycles of updating an rolling back, I though I finally had it because there was no beeping or message when I turned it on... But there was NOTHING. Blank screen, no response to buttons. And the best part - when I rolled back to the original factory firmware, I got the same thing. That's a fairly brick like behavior.
That was all late last night/early this morning and I had to go into work today so I'll need to check my next theory this afternoon... I know that towards the end I tried some of the other read/write operations and I'm really hopeful that I just managed to mix something up (used the wrong read operation to write a corrupt firmware to the file i then tried to load). Lots of clicking in the same file names, so it's possible I just need to fetch the firmware again (both er9x and factory) and try to reload those again (only to back is the same boat I was before - but that's better than bricked).
I did read something on the forum about fuses and eeprom not getting over written. Or the avr programmer having a switch to overwrite the eeprom - is that perhaps not right?
Any help is greatly appreciated.