[Elphel-support] camera bricked after re-flashing to elphel353-8.0.9 :(

[Andrey Filippov]

Akos,

looking at your previous email it is very likely that you "tricked" the
camera into erasing the flash without having access to the new files. The
size of the flash memory is 128MB, the camera RAM (not to count a separate
video 64MB attached to the FPGA) is 64MB, so it is generally not possible
for the camera to read the files to the RAM before erasing. This is why
normally camera double checks the files, then erases flash and then loads
data over the NFS and writes to the flash.

Do you have log file from the NFS server? Camera writes there during erasing
and writing to the flash.



On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 8:41 PM, Ákos Maróy <akos at maroy.hu> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Continuing my previous e-mail, I managed to brick the camera after
> re-flashing with the 8.0.9 image. What I did was, as I had the new image
> accessible via NFS, at /var/tmp/nfs_test/, was the following:
>
> cd /var/tmp/nfs_test
> ./nfs_update
>
>
> this made some checkes, some copies, and then it said: reboot, at the
> end. ever since, the camera doesn't work, meaning that none of the
> lights light up as the ethernet cable is plugged into it. (this is the
> same calbing that had it work before)
>
> I tried with the IP address I set, and also with the original IP address
> of 192.168.0.9. (of course, I've reset my laptops IP accordingly).
>
>
> I can get the lights on the camera to turn on if I plug-unplug-re-plug
> the ethernet cable in quick succession. but, the camera is still
> unreachable. also, at this time, while my presumption was that it would
> enter netboot mode, the lights behave the same as 'usual', the yellow
> one is permanently on, the green one blinks sporadically.
>

Yes, in the netboot mode the ethernet port is initialized immediately by the
hard-wired bootloader , in the normal mode it is done only during the normal
Linux boot, so if the OS is missing, or startup scripts are missing - the
eth0 will never come up.


>
>
> how would I re-vitalize the camera?
>
> I'm looking at the netboot installs cript, but I see that it would call
> the etraxfsboot - but where would I get this from?
> (yes, I'm deliberately trying to avoid setting up a complete dev
> environment. IMHO a simple re-flashing of existing images should not
> require a full dev env, including cross-compilers & stuff.
>
>
> Akos
>


Setting the full development environment is probably your best choice now.
You see, normally everything should be done over the web reflash script -
personally I did not have to use netboot for more than a year. And reflashed
cameras many times.

In your case the web interface could not reach the files over the NFS, so I
would recommend you to find what was wrong. But now it is too late,
unfortunately - you found a way to bypass those checks.

Andrey
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