Bad flash, recovery

[lwis]

Hi folks!

I have a T31N that I accidentally partially flashed the wrong binary to the bootloader, now I'm unable to get anything from UART or anything in cloner for recovery.

When I connect UART and power the camera via USB I see a little flicker on the activity LED of my UART adapter, but nothing else.

Any tips/tricks to getting the camera to show up in ingenic cloner for recovery?

[themactep]

do you disable flash when using cloner? usb interface won't be enabled if bootloader kicks in. also, doublecheck the USB cable, it should have data lines. the one that comes with the camera does not, it's a power-only cable.

[lwis]

do you disable flash when using cloner? usb interface won't be enabled if bootloader kicks in.

What do you mean by disable flash? The bootloader doesn't seem to be kicking in at all as I'm seeing nothing over UART

also, doublecheck the USB cable, it should have data lines. the one that comes with the camera does not, it's a power-only cable.

I've been sure to check with multiple cables 👍

I've also tried booting from SD card bootloader, that doesn't yield any results either.

[themactep]

Run the cloner, configure it for your soc and the firmware you want to flash. Press the "Start" button in the cloner UI.

Short pins 5 and 6 on the flash chip to prevent the camera from reading the bootoader from the flash and connect the USB cable to the camera. Wait two seconds and release the short.

In a few seconds the cloner should recognize the camera and start communicating via USB.

[lwis]

Progress! I was missing the shorting part, thank you. I'm now seeing FLASH NO SUPPORT in cloner shortly after the process starts when trying to flash either the boot+kernel+rootfs or a full image.

[themactep]

What flash chip is it? Z25Q128?

[themactep]

Check this out.

https://github.com/themactep/openipc-wiki/blob/846e0a34ee4699786c0c8f4651eadbee345e044f/hardware/components/soc/ingenic/soc.md#troubleshooting

[lwis]

It is! Some more progress, after the (attempted?) erasure it fails with STAGE2 INIT ERR.

[lwis]

Hey @themactep thanks for the help, I've tried a few more times with different machines/cables/shorting timings/with and without UART but I'm still seeing the same error. Is my board FUBAR?

[themactep]

Did you check the guide on cloner? There is a troubleshooting at the end of the document. https://openipc.org/dl/USBCloner_The_Burn_tool_Quick_Guide.pdf

Post screenshots of your settings in cloner and the log of what you see in the console where it is launched.

[lwis]

I've worked through the troubleshooting (to the best of my ability!)

[themactep]

Make sure your user has access to write into the port (/dev/ttyUSBx). You should either be in a group with write access (plugdev?) or run cloner with sudo (yes, bad practice. but it might work)

[lwis]

I tried running cloner on a Windows machine instead, and it worked first time 🤦 Not sure what the issue was on Linux!

And the ending to this story isn't happy, mine has secureboot so I'm back to stock anyway 🥲

Thanks for all the help @themactep! Hopefully I can source a different camera to install OpenIPC on 🤞

[themactep]

If you are in States or Canada, there is a huge 50% sale on Wyze V3 right now.

[lwis]

I really wish Wyze was available in the UK! ☹️