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erikkaashoek / tinySA

tiny Spectrum Analyzer
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"Half-bricked" TinySA Ultra #67

Open MarkMLl opened 1 year ago

MarkMLl commented 1 year ago

I've got a TinySA Ultra here, believed genuine and marked HW V0.4.5.1 which was working fine until this afternoon, when (I think) I noticed that STORE AS STARTUP was checked and unchecked it.

The result of that was a register dump overlaying the graticule, cycling power gets to that point repeatedly even if the battery has been disconnected.

I've upgraded via DFU to tinySA4_v1.4-99-g8bfcfd7.bin, noting that DFU told me "DFU state(10) = dfuERROR, status(10) = Device's firmware is corrupt. It cannot return to run-time (non-DFU) operations". It ran for a while, but then (I think) I did something else with either STORE AS STARTUP or LOAD STARTUP and once more got to the "register dump over graticule" state.

I'm now in a position where any startup- even immediately after an apparently-successful reload over DFU, immediately takes me to "register dump over graticule" state with no menu accessibility etc. Hence, "half-bricked" :-)

How do I recover from this, and what can I do to help pin down the problem so that it doesn't affect other users?

MarkMLl commented 1 year ago

Noting no response from the developers or community, I decided to risk a mass-erase hence

$ sudo dfu-util -a 0 -s 0x08000000:mass-erase:force:leave -D tinySA.bin

This appeared to restore operation.

I was reluctant to do this earlier since I could find no documentation of how mass-erase applied to this specific project, and was wary in case there was a risk that it would do something which couldn't be recovered.

If I can find what caused the earlier problem I'll comment.

Ho-Ro commented 1 year ago

$ sudo dfu-util -a 0 -s 0x08000000:mass-erase:force:leave -D tinySA.bin

tinySA.bin??? This is the FW for the tinySA Basic (the small one), I assume you used tinySA4.bin.

Have you tried to switch on the unit while the jog switch is pressed left or right? This is an easy way to erase the config and restart with default values.

MarkMLl commented 1 year ago

I followed the instructions verbatim and renamed the downloaded file (tinySA4_v1.4-99-g8bfcfd7.bin) before running dfu-util :-)

If it happens again I'll try jog-left/right but all my attempts in that area so far were unsuccessful.

Sarah-C commented 7 months ago

Nice! I'm glad it worked out for you. =)