Crazyflie Bolt 1.1 M2 and M3 LED's only turn on. Is it bricked?

[thehumbleboy]

We had initially implemented Bolt 1.1 with the lighthouse deck. But the normal cfclient method of flashing didn't help in arming the FC. So we found a fix to write custom config.mk file to auto disarm and add an initial thrust value and it worked just fine. But for some reason after successful attempts to fly the drone with no problems, it stopped arming. And then we reflashed it with the configs we wrote (btw we had issues with the lighthouse not configuring so once we used cfclient it miraculously armed, not sure on the system working for the bolt, the Crazyflie 2.1 had no issues whatsoever) only for it to just "brick" aka M2 and M3 LED's are turned ON and no initialization sequence, no blinking of the leds either.

So we went through flashing the bootloader first, then flashing the firmware, then flashed the nrf bootloader just to be sure. We tried all methods, cload, flashing with st-link debugger and dfu method, had no luck in bringing it to the normal state. Then I took the road to debug the firmware to see whats happening. Apparently its stuck in ApplicationIdleHook but there is comments telling if im in debug mode its bound to reach the idle hook. But the behaviour seemed same in either debug or normal state (no initialization sequence). I looked for forums for answers, there was this forum which was a bit different that checked hardware status (C1 cap and NRST voltage). It was 3V. So we are now quite not sure whether the hardware is faulty or the software is bricked.

This is the state of the FC right after power is given. Note that we have desoldered the JST 3 pin connectors on the FC to use a 4 in 1 ESC

So if we can get suggestions of hardware and software checks it would be very useful. Would appreciate the help!

[enyanil]

Hi @thehumbleboy!

Sorry to hear that you are having issues with the Bolt.
I would recommend trying to put it into bootloader mode from an unpowered state (pressing the power button and then connecting the battery) and perform a cold boot recovery if you haven't tried that already. You can find the instructions for this here. Make sure that you are selecting the bolt when you are flashing the latest firmware.

Could you also clarify what firmware you want to flash now? Is it the latest release, an older release or your own?
We have tried to flash the Bolt with the latest firmware here and find no issues.

Let me know if the issues persists and we will try to dig deeper!

[thehumbleboy]

Yes, i was fortunately able to do the cold boot recovery from cfclient. But when flashing the firmware it doesn't seem to get initalized. It stays in the state as shown in the picture. I've pulled the latest firmware from git and all i added was in tools/make/config.mk was
-DSTART_DISARMED
-DDEFAULT_IDLE_THRUST=5000
Also, it doesn't connect to the drone to flash the firmware via cfclient. It says trying to connect in firmware mode

[ataffanel]

You cannot connect in firmware mode if the firmware is not starting. For context on the LED: The M2 LED is controlled by the power management/radio chip, All the other by the STM32. If M3 lights up it means that the STM32 is starting, but it seems to be crashing very early during boot since it does not control any of the other LED.

Can you try to flash the bolt firmware from the client using the cold boot tab? This way you will flash the latest release firmware that has been tested to work so it might give us some clue on what is happening.

As an aside: it is not possible to brik the Crazyflie when using only the radio bootloader since it cannot erase itself. So as long as you stick with the radio bootloader you should alway be able to try again.