Re: [chirp_devel] How to brick an FT-60
I think not. The radio state gets saved in flash every power off, at least. Kind of dwarfs a few hundred clone writes. And the radio was fairly new as these things go. And modern flash is usually good for 10K - 100K writes. But it's plausible for the first radio's failure. Part of a spectrum of stuff related to what I said might be abuse, which also includes a lot of serial cable in & out, knob twiddling, ...
But the new one died the day it was purchased, after two OK clone writes. On the third, with the same image that killed the first one, it died with the same symptoms. I'm not buying flash write wearout.
The bits did it.
-dan
On Mar 22, 2014, at 6:02 PM, jon - jon@jonshouse.co.uk wrote:
I would try de-soldering the 24C256 and soldering a new one in. Most probable cause of its death is passing the maximum write cycles for the eeprom. With luck the yaesu firmware is bright enough to initialise a blank one ..... with luck !
Jon
On Sat, 2014-03-22 at 20:32 -0700, chirp.cordless@xoxy.net wrote:
I think not. The radio state gets saved in flash every power off, at least. Kind of dwarfs a few hundred clone writes. And the radio was fairly new as these things go. And modern flash is usually good for 10K - 100K writes.
Ok, but the 24c256 is not a modern flash! it's an ancient device.
I personally have managed to wear a few out just with write cycles. It is also possible to clock them with crap by touching the pins while they are running, unlike "modern flash" they are not written in blocks at the device level and need no unlock to perform a write.
But it's plausible for the first radio's failure. Part of a spectrum of stuff related to what I said might be abuse, which also includes a lot of serial cable in & out, knob twiddling, ...
But the new one died the day it was purchased, after two OK clone writes. On the third, with the same image that killed the first one, it died with the same symptoms. I'm not buying flash write wearout.
The bits did it.
Ok, I will take your word for it. I just guessed from the schematic in the ft-60r service manual and personal experience with other radios, I don't own one.
Unless the radio has some other place its storing its data, real flash in the microcontroller for example, then my cure still probably works. Its likely (I only suspect though) that the firmware when presented with a blank or random eeprom contents should re-initialise it.
It would be possible to garble the contents of the eeprom by shorting one of the LCD mux lines to the SPI clock line, this might change enough data in eeprom to unblock the firmware from whatever endless loop its crashed into - but like I said personally I would unsolder it and put a new chip down !
You may not agree with my justification but its still the logical cure?
Thanks, Jon
Did you say that although the radio appears unresponsive,
will it still "act" as if it will clone? If so, will it upload or download, or both?
Also, Will it visibly go into alignment mode? To enter the Alignment mode: 1. Press and hold in the MONI and LAMP switches turn- ing the radio on. Once the radio is on, release these two switches. 2. Press the keypad in the following sequence: [(MHz)] [0( )SET] [1(SQ TYP)] [7(P1)] [V/M(PRI)] 3. Press the [F/W] key to cause “A0 REF.xxx” to appear on the display for five seconds, this signifies that the trans- ceiver is now in the “Alignment Mode.” ... I would be curious to examine your "bad" image vs a previous "good" image, vs even one you might have taken much, much earlier in your development process. Can you share them privately with me directly off-list?
-Jens
________________________________ From: "chirp.cordless@xoxy.net" chirp.cordless@xoxy.net To: chirp_devel@intrepid.danplanet.com Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 10:32 PM Subject: Re: [chirp_devel] How to brick an FT-60
I think not. The radio state gets saved in flash every power off, at least. Kind of dwarfs a few hundred clone writes. And the radio was fairly new as these things go. And modern flash is usually good for 10K - 100K writes. But it's plausible for the first radio's failure. Part of a spectrum of stuff related to what I said might be abuse, which also includes a lot of serial cable in & out, knob twiddling, ...
But the new one died the day it was purchased, after two OK clone writes. On the third, with the same image that killed the first one, it died with the same symptoms. I'm not buying flash write wearout.
The bits did it.
-dan
On Mar 22, 2014, at 6:02 PM, jon - jon@jonshouse.co.uk wrote:
I would try de-soldering the 24C256 and soldering a new one in. Most probable cause of its death is passing the maximum write cycles for the eeprom. With luck the yaesu firmware is bright enough to initialise a blank one ..... with luck !
Jon
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