Unable to Deploy, there has to be a way (GHI Attention is needed)

doing a search on the forum of “unable to deploy” revealed over 871 messages… i mean this has to be one of the most asked questions here and i think GHI really has to step up and help fix the issue once and for all…

I’m sure that no user here can say that they haven’t ran into this issue at least once every two days if they are actively developing and deploying to their board…
Today I’ve wasting at least another hour when i ran into this problem… resetting, re-flashing the firmware and so on…

So at first i thought it maybe linked to VS2010, so i decided to test the theory and it turns out VS2010 has nothing to do with and it is all in the firmware and here is why:

my Board: FEZ SPIDER.

  1. i created a simple gadgeteer application… that does nothing but blink an LED… deployed to the board, the LED blinked fine…

  2. i open MFDeploy saved the HEX of this simple application for later use…

  3. deployed the hex to make sure it is working and not corrupted… (It deployed and worked fine).

  4. went on with my other application and started testing and deploying everything was working fine… and suddenly i can’t deploy… check your hardware message in my VS2010 appeared…

  5. went back to MFDeploy, rebooted my device… erased the application… good so far…

  6. in MFdeploy i decided to deploy the hex (blinking LED) i saved earlier, remember this worked fine…earlier…

  7. hit deploy, chose my hex… and it Erased my board fine and started deploying until about a 80% toward the end and bang an error appeared…and i can’t deploy…

  8. rebooted, reset, you name it none helped… when it first reboots i can ping and when i hit deploy it does erase and reboots on it’s own and it gets to 80% and fails…

  9. tried to deploy the hex many times without success.

  10. which tells me that something in TinyBooter got corrupted… and my Question is WHY and HOW?

the only fix is to re flash the firmware… which is not a solution in my opinion…

So Please GHI we need your help fixing this issue… I’m sure everyone in the community will be grateful if we can put this to rest.

Your VOTE please…

Thank you.
Jay.

I sometimes have similar issues. When I deploy with VS, it says that it will reset the board and I hear the USB unplug sound. However, the board (FEZ Cobra) doesn’t come back… Sometimes a simple hardware reset is needed (by pressing the reset button), sometimes I need to reconnect the USB connector to solve this issue. Sometimes I even have to restart my computer.

The biggest problem is when I hibernate my computer with the board left connected. Then you certainly need to restart Windows if you ever want to deploy again.
Till now, I think all these issues are related to the USB driver (I’m on Win7 64-bit, but I remember having this issue on Win7 32-bit too).

95% of casses are related to a user error.

Not in my case and it is proven above… hence the test.hex file i used…to make sure it is not a user error…

You should never need to reload firmware. Unless you have loaded a new SDK.

By the way, have you voted on our suggestion to Microsoft on netmf SDK? We asked for detailed deployment log so we and you can see exactly where the errors is.

Also, do you know that one of the main goals of netmf 4.3 is to speed up and improve deploying and boot up?

What I am saying is that this is not as bad as you think but we have been working with Microsoft on making this better for months. :slight_smile:

i also noticed that over at Netduino, not many report similar issue in fact a search for “unable to deploy” returned zero … and based on your answers if it is true then 95% of Fez users are less experienced than Netduino users, and if that is true, then FEZ shouldn’t suffer from these issues at ALL because it needs to be idiot proof…

the reality of the matter is, FEZ has a problem either in the USB driver or the firmware… and it must be fixed… at least for the premium products ( EMX )…

thanks.

This has already been committed to 4.3 so anyone vote at this stage is not important.

the more reason why we need you to step in and help now… since I’m sure you have better tools and better ways to know what is causing these issues… i would help but i have very limited resource and knowledge in the subject… and not to forget that you probably have access to those up coming features already since you are helping Microsoft implement them… my question is why wait and not act now…

thanks.