[CF-1] Connection problems during firmware flashing

[darkblinded]

I tried to flash the firmware, after I had some connection problems yesterday, but got errors. The CF was found, reading and writing codeblocks worked correctly. When I started the flashing process, it worked fluently untill 50%. At that time it stopped and continued with ~ 2% every five minutes for about 10 minutes untill throwing "Error during flash operation (err code -1)". It even continued when I turned the CF off, so the connection must have been broken before.
I also noticed that the red and green led began alternating at the point, where the flashing got slow. Not the usual alternating where the green led blinks and the red led shows data transmission and blinks. It was just red-green-red-green-...
As I tried again, the CF refused to connect in cold bootloader mode (and was also not found using the connect button). When turning on the red and green leds flash once and then either directly start alternating or in some rare cases behaved normally and I was able to get it connected in bootloader mode again but the same happened as before.
Today I got it to connect in cold bootloader mode once, flashing failed again, but now as I turn it on the red and green led blink once and then stay completely off. As I turn on the CF to connect in cold bootloader mode I can see a single small flash on the CR's green led.

Things I tried:
- Switching channels
- Switching to 1 or 2 mbps
- Exchancing the CR's antenna
- Measuring the battery output (all completely normally)

[chad]

Hi, just curious, what OS are you using, what firmware are you flashing (built form source of "official" release), and how are you flashing (command-line, GUI)?

[darkblinded]

Hi, just curious, what OS are you using, what firmware are you flashing (built form source of "official" release), and how are you flashing (command-line, GUI)?

I'm running 64bit Linux, the firmware version is the official 2014.01.0 downloaded precompiled from the homepage and I'm flashing using the CR and GUI.

[darkblinded]

I got it to connect again and tried using the cfloader from commandline but got the same result. The only difference was, that the commandline client recognized the connection error directly as it occurred and did not continue transmission for another 10 minutes.

Code: Select all

Restart the CrazyFlie you want to bootload in the next  10 seconds ...
Connection established!
Flash pages: 128 | Page size: 1024 | Buffer pages: 10 | Start page: 10
118 KBytes of flash avaliable for firmware image.

Flashing 54667 bytes (54 pages) ..........10
Error during flash operation (code -1). Maybe wrong radio link?
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./cfloader", line 199, in <module>
    raise Exception()
Exception

[tobias]

This is strange problem. When flashing with the bootloader the communication is using a fixed channel and frequency. As it seems to stop at the same point I'm thinking it is not the radio communication. Could it be a problem with the flash memory in the MCU maybe. If you flash it using the cloader from the command line have you ever passed the first "..........10" printout. When the "10" is displayed this is when the data is written into flash and this seems to fail.

My best guess is a broken flash in the MCU. I've sent you a PM.