Electron stuck in boot loader

Troubleshooting
1

After loading particle-cli and dfu-util on OS X Yosemite, I attempted to flash my Electron through USB. It recognized the device and claimed that it completed successfully, but it does not exit boot loader mode. I’ve tried pressing reset and reloading Tinker. Tinker was not in /usr/local/ but I pulled down a copy of electron_tinker.bin from Github and used that. It programmed that successfully but still does not exit boot loader mode.

The output that I get from dfu-util -l is here:

Apollo:Blink-LEDs n4mho$ dfu-util -l
dfu-util 0.9

Copyright 2005-2009 Weston Schmidt, Harald Welte and OpenMoko Inc.
Copyright 2010-2016 Tormod Volden and Stefan Schmidt
This program is Free Software and has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
Please report bugs to http://sourceforge.net/p/dfu-util/tickets/

Deducing device DFU version from functional descriptor length
Found Runtime: [05ac:828a] ver=0112, devnum=7, cfg=1, intf=3, path=“29-1.8.1.3”, alt=0, name=“UNKNOWN”, serial=“UNKNOWN"
Found DFU: [2b04:d00a] ver=0200, devnum=5, cfg=1, intf=0, path=“20-4”, alt=1, name=”@DCT Flash /0x00000000/01016Kg", serial=“00000000010C"
Found DFU: [2b04:d00a] ver=0200, devnum=5, cfg=1, intf=0, path=“20-4”, alt=0, name=”@Internal Flash /0x08000000/03016Ka,01016Kg,01064Kg,07*128Kg", serial=“00000000010C”

Also from loading Tinker:

Apollo:Blink-LEDs n4mho$ particle flash --usb electron_tinker.bin
Found DFU device 2b04:d00a
checking file electron_tinker.bin
spawning dfu-util -d 2b04:d00a -a 0 -i 0 -s 0x08020000:leave -D electron_tinker.bin
dfu-util 0.9

Copyright 2005-2009 Weston Schmidt, Harald Welte and OpenMoko Inc.
Copyright 2010-2016 Tormod Volden and Stefan Schmidt
This program is Free Software and has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
Please report bugs to http://sourceforge.net/p/dfu-util/tickets/

dfu-util: Invalid DFU suffix signature
dfu-util: A valid DFU suffix will be required in a future dfu-util release!!!
Deducing device DFU version from functional descriptor length
Opening DFU capable USB device…
ID 2b04:d00a
Run-time device DFU version 011a
Claiming USB DFU Interface…
Setting Alternate Setting #0 …
Determining device status: state = dfuIDLE, status = 0
dfuIDLE, continuing
DFU mode device DFU version 011a
Device returned transfer size 4096
DfuSe interface name: "Internal Flash "
Downloading to address = 0x08020000, size = 5776
Download [=========================] 100% 5776 bytes
Download done.
File downloaded successfully

Flash success!

Suggestions?

2

The CLI has written application firmware to the system firmware region. I’m guessing you’re using an old version of the cli?

Be sure your CLI is up to date by running npm install -g particle-cli, and then update system firmware via
particle update.

1 Like
3

The version before and after running the update is 1.8.3.

particle update returns this: “There are currently no system firmware updates available for this device.”

4

Repeated the process on a Windows 10 PC and the version of particle-cli installed was 1.11.0.

The system firmware process worked as well.

How to get the Mac version of npm to fetch something newer than 1.8.3?

Thanks,
Mike

5

npm update -g particle-cli should work well

6

No, tried, but it doesn’t change it. Previously, I had deleted particle-cli a couple of times and reinstalled, with version 1.8.3 downloaded each time.

7

You can try npm install -g particle-cli@1.11.0 and see how things go