[solved] 1v62 - problems with flashing and espruino kind of bricked now

Hi,

I was trying to flash a new version to my 1.3b board but that failed and now I don't really know what to do with my Espruino board as it's kind of bricked - when I plug it in to my linux box it's not recognized at all and blue and red lights are lit very dimly. All I can do is switch into bootloader mode (blue light is pulsing) at which point device pops up in the system as /dev/ttyACM0

When I try to flash with python script then I get this:

python stm32loader.py -p /dev/ttyACM0 -evw ~/Downloads/espruino_1v61/espruino_1v61_espruino_1r3.bin 
Reading data from /home/graf/Downloads/espruino_1v61/espruino_1v61_espruino_1r3.bin
Bootloader version 0x30
Chip id 0x430, STM32F1, performance, XL-density
Global mass erase; this may take a while
Writing 214728 bytes to start address 0x8000000
Write 256 bytes at 0x8000000
    WRITE FAIL - try and recover
    WRITE FAIL - wait
    WRITE FAIL - retry
    WRITE FAIL - try and recover
    WRITE FAIL - wait

and so on for ever (well I gave up after ~15 minutes). During this time the green light is blinking from time to time.

When I try to flash with WebIDE then it's a bit different. After download is complete green and red LEDs are blinking very quickly for a couple of minutes. Then only the red LED is lit for about a minute and then I get this error message:

Can't find STM32 bootloader. Make sure the chip is reset into bootloader mode by holding down BTN1 while pressing RST

I was flashing without problems with the previous versions and also Espruino was working fine before that failed attempt to update today. Now I can't even flash 1v61.
Any ideas, please??

Success! After countless tries, fiddling with cables, changing ports, pushing espruino buttons in frustration etc finally it went through with no errors. After that every consecutive try so far works fine.

I don't have a clue what was the problem as I'm still using the same cable and USB port. But I guess if you get the same problem then just keep trying, it will come back to life :)

Hi. If you're using the STM32loader you need '-k' to get it reliable - there's info on the Download page: http://www.espruino.com/Download

If you're using the Web IDE, do you have Chrome, or Chromium? On Ubuntu, Chromium is a much older version and it seems the serial port access is a bit glitchy. There's supposed to be a warning about it in the flasher, but it looks like that may be broken with the new version - I'll see about fixing it.

edit: The warning is for versions <31. To be honest v31 might be a bit dodgy, but the v32 that I get with Ubuntu 12.04 seems good.

I'm using the latest version of Google Chrome (stable).

Don't know how I managed to skip the -k flag, I will try it the next time. Thanks.

Got it from this site http://www.espruino.com/Serial+Bootloader
Is it different instructions for other boards (I have HY-Mini too) or does it need to be updated to include -k?

Thanks! I've just updated those docs.

The -k switch is actually a workaround for the bootloader that ships on rev 1.3 boards (it's not needed on others). Due to a silicon errata the USB is unreliable at lower clock speeds, so there's a bit of hacking around needed to increase the USB clock speeds and make it reliable.