Wednesday 4 January 2017

Flashing a bricked SP Racing F3 Flight Controller



I've been struggling for two days with this and finally found the solution. Scroll down for that.

Background:
So my UART2 plug broke off after a bad crash causing my quad to drop out of the sky on the next flight. Once I found the broken port, I thought that I could simply plug it into a new one, so I did.

Once connected I had problems getting the RX to be recognised, so I thought that the setting must be in Cleanflight. I went to the ports tab and changed some settings and boom, lost connection after saving. Since then I couldn't reconnect.
I tried the following, to no avail:

  • I tried the Zadig driver fixer when the ports weren't available, 
  • I tried the ImpulseRC Driver fixer
  • I tried the STM flash loader demonstrator - this worked after a few tries, but then I stopped being able to connect to the FC again.
  • I tried various SP Racing firmwares, thinking that perhaps I didn't have the same model
Anyway, finally I find a reddit post and I actually read the whole thread for once, and way at the bottom I get the answer.

Solution:
  • I went to 'Add or Remove Programs or Features' and removed the CP210 drivers(look for software by Silicon Laboratories Inc.)
  • Then I removed the STM3 drivers, just search for STM in the list.
  • Finally I installed the CP210 drivers again, and ignored the STM3 drivers.(these drivers can be downloaded from the links on the Cleanflight landing screen.
  • I opened Cleanflight and in the Firmware Flasher I selected my FC model and firmware version. I also checked:
    "No reboot sequence"
    "Flash on connect"
    "Full chip erase"
    and "Manual baud rate" and I set it to 256000
  • I then clicked on "Load Firmware(Online) and waited for it to be loaded
  • I shorted out the two boot pins(google to find yours) on my FC and then plugged in the USB.
BOOOM! instant flashing, no more USB errrors or bootloader errors like before!

I hope this helps you as it helped me

4 comments:

  1. This was the solution I was looking for! Thank you very much!! :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Seems like the thing I was missing was manual baud rate. Thanks a lot!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you so much .I owe you a beer. 😀

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi,
    I'm having problem connecting to betaflight,I'm using windows 7 and have spracingF3 version 4.0.3

    I just recently flashed the newest version of betaflight to the board. Betaflight can see the board but it doesn't want to allow me access to any of the settings.

    I can see that the driver is installed correctly and new port appears.

    But when trying to connect I'm getting the following error:
    2019-06-18 @ 21:58:37 -- Serial port successfully opened with ID: 3

    2019-06-18 @ 21:58:47 -- No configuration received within 10 seconds, communication failed

    2019-06-18 @ 21:58:47 -- Serial port successfully closed

    Any ideas what can I do?

    Thanks in advance

    ReplyDelete

Devlog 8: AI and Radar explanation.