Cannot update Hydra to 4.2 firmware

Archive
1

I’ve been trying for several days (on and off) to update my Hydra to the 4.2FW.
I’ve used the HydraFirmwareUpdater - it fails every time with:

Hydra found at Port#: COM3
Device will be updated automatically! DO NOT disconnect or turn off the device!
Updating Firmware. Please wait…
Error while connecting to the device. Try again
or visit GHI Electronics – Where Hardware Meets Software for information to update manually.

This is with a Hydra where I erased using the boot.bin on an SD card - properly comes up with serial port (indicated above).
The tinybooter portion gets loaded, a request to reboot dialog comes up, I do that, then click (the now enabled) Next, which is when I get the “Error while connecting to the device” message.
Further attempts to update returns “Connecting to device… Failed” until I re-erase with the SD card (or MISO trick).

I’ve attempted a manual update instead - in this case, I get through loading the TinyBooter and am usually only mildly confused by the plethora of “enter TinyBooter mode” instructions followed by “you don’t need to do that” part.
Once I get TinyBooter loaded and started (the device shows up as a USB device now), MFDeploy will NOT deploy the firmware - it reports a dialog with something like “Object cannot be null”, then reports no communication with the Hydra.

I’m slightly suspicious of my USB drivers (although this is on a machine (a VM) that has NEVER had 4.1 installed).
The drivers in the Windows/system32/drivers directory are 35Kb, while the drivers under the GHI folder are 28K - so I’m suspicious. However, when I manually installed the one from the GHI folder (GHI_NETMF_Interface.sys), the system REALLY didn’t like it… Although, I’m running Win7-64bit - so not sure if those are the current drivers anyway, although that’s what the properties reported it was…

Suggestions?

Thanks
– Hugh

2

I was helping a customer who was using VM and couldn’t update his hydra, plugged to my laptop and update simply worked.

3

Hopefully that’s not the end of the story… I only have VMs for Windows… (MacPro owner).

4

There has to be a way. I think SAM-BA come in linux flavor. Check the atmel website or search the web on ways to make SAM-BA work. This is a tool from Atmel, the processor maker.

5

Eureka!
Ok - I rebooted to my BootCamp partition (which I almost never use) - uninstalled 4.1, installed 4.2, then ran the auto-updater on my Hydra which was erased using the SD method.
Voila - first try - success!

So - there’s some odd issue with shuffling the bits though a virtual USB port - timing? It should NOT be dropped bits - but without a protocol analyzer, I can’t tell…
(anyone have one to loan for a few days? :^)

I looked at the samba updater - but its interface is even worse than… than… damn! my attempt to load the config failed and I didn’t want to spend more time on it.

So - the answer for Mac owners is: BootCamp!
I’m using VMWare Fusion (which I found much more stable than Parallels in the first few versions) - others MAY work better? Any Parallels users out there? VirtualBox?
Now - back to real work!

6

@ hhoover -

A number of months ago there was a USB VM problem found, with virtual machines running on a Windows host, that was fixed.

There is also a problem with VMs and Fusion on the Mac, which I have been told is more complex than what was found with Windows. Given the very small number of Mac users, and Bootcamp functionality, I don’t expect the issue to be resolved in the near future.’