MicroHacker Forum

shortened my vFL Convers
external FLASH has been corrupted
it is possible to read it but it cannot be overwritten

how could this be fixed?
could an external FLASH be rewritten via JTAG?

im extract my broken external FLASH

can you help me?

thank you

Hi,

from the contents of the file it seems that you have a problem I also encountered on one Convers+.
It was working OK with original FW but upon flashing to a modified version it failed. Digging into it I found out that someone else played with it - it had soldering marks all over its PCB.
I was able to repair it by replacing one of the three 5V to 3.3V TTL multiplexer / demultiplexer chip - no. 5 in the above image:


During the investigation I also saw that the contents of the downloaded file contains part of different regions of flash that are multiplicated over other regions. Yours seem to have that also: You should first start by gently heating the PCB, have all the pins from MAC, this TTL chip and External Flash chip "washed" with plenty of flux in order to exclude a bad pin connection to PCB. If this doesn't work then I suggest to replace that TTL chip.

Read this section

viewtopic.php?f=25&t=30&start=30

Stevebe, his Convers+ is booting, but doesn't see a valid External Fash.
I know for sure that it's booting because he is able to download External Flash contents by CAN.

... so the information present in that topic is of no use to him, unfortunately.

I can read main and external flashram
I can write to main ram and no write to external Flash

See what make my convers

Yes, it seems it tries to boot and it fails so it reboots.

If its boot looping (flashing)
reload new flash and main with ipcupdate or force with ucds i have had this happen many times when making mods only time i have had to use jtag is when i have screwed the pbl
Were abouts are you tomy

DGAlexandru wrote: ↑10 Jan 2021, 21:25 Stevebe, his Convers+ is booting, but doesn't see a valid External Fash.
I know for sure that it's booting because he is able to download External Flash contents by CAN.

... so the information present in that topic is of no use to him, unfortunately.

If its boot looping then no. I have never not been able to recover from this situation
Never had a flash fail or dry joint only eeprom .. my guess if its a unit used for mods its corrupt data.
Send it to me i make it work

Sevebe, did you analyse the dump he has put in the first message?

Please read my first mesage / look at the explaining image I've put there...
This is not because of a flashing problem. It is a hardware problem: the TTL mux / demux chip that is between MAC and External Flash is not working as it should.

In terms of hardware repair I know you have a lot of tools to play with so yes, you could help him with replacing the components that are damaged.

Tomy75 is from Slovakia.