control4user007 Posted August 7, 2016 Share Posted August 7, 2016 Hi everyone, Saw a steal price on a "for parts" hc-250 on eBay. Was cheap enough that I thought it would be a fun project to see if I could breathe some life into it. The unit boots up, wifi light blinks yellow continuously (my working one turns blue after a few seconds), but nothing comes up on the screen (and the ethernet lights don't turn on when connected to switch). I cracked it open and saw what I believe is a serial port (4 pins). Does anyone have any experience dialing into these units? Could this port possibly be used to fix it ? I was thinking of getting this to see if I could get anything back from the unit. Could be a wild goose chase, but hoping to learn something and have some fun Edited to add some information I found online about the port: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dutsnekcirf Posted June 17, 2018 Share Posted June 17, 2018 Were you ever able to get this system back up and working properly? My HC-250 is behaving exactly as you describe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alanchow Posted June 19, 2018 Share Posted June 19, 2018 On 6/17/2018 at 2:21 PM, dutsnekcirf said: Were you ever able to get this system back up and working properly? My HC-250 is behaving exactly as you describe. You can do a factory restore on it using the pin hole in the back. Note that this clears EVERYTHING. Project, firmware, etc. Do not use this if you want a network reset. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dutsnekcirf Posted June 19, 2018 Share Posted June 19, 2018 7 hours ago, alanchow said: You can do a factory restore on it using the pin hole in the back. Note that this clears EVERYTHING. Project, firmware, etc. Do not use this if you want a network reset. Hi Alan. Thanks for your response. I've attempted the Factory Restore and it doesn't appear to fix anything. When I power on the device the yellow wifi led immediately starts to blink at a slowish rate. Then when I insert the paper clip and hold it for 5 to 7 seconds the yellow wifi led starts to blink noticeably faster. It is my understanding that this is when it's performing the factory restore by clearing the project, firmware, reformatting and repartitioning the Micro-SD card, etc. After about 5 minutes of fast blinking it simply goes back to it's slowish blinking rate. There are more details related to my issue here: Based on my symptoms, chrischris' symptoms, and what Control4User007 described in this thread they all appeared similar and so I was just wonder if he'd figured out how to fix it or not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pounce Posted June 19, 2018 Share Posted June 19, 2018 Are you able to ssh into it? Does it get an IP on your network? Have you cracked it open and swapped the sd card for a new one and attempted a reset? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dutsnekcirf Posted June 19, 2018 Share Posted June 19, 2018 I am not able to SSH into it and it does not get an IP on my network. The IP was statically assigned before it failed. Since I've attempted the Factory Reset a number of times I've also verified that no IP is being leased from the DHCP server on my router. Additionally, I do not see any link lights on the Ethernet port itself. I have also cracked it open and swapped the SD Card for a new one and attempted the reset again. No change. After performing the factory reset I pulled the new SD card out again to see if it had been automatically formatted and repartitioned as part of the factory reset process but nothing had changed on the card. I'm expecting to receive a USB to TTL serial cable today and plan to connect it to the onboard serial header in order to see what I can during POST. I'll report back when I do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pounce Posted June 19, 2018 Share Posted June 19, 2018 Sounds dead. Luckily, you can get one for around 100. I just bought one here actually. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alanchow Posted June 19, 2018 Share Posted June 19, 2018 Yeah definitely dead. Sorry Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dutsnekcirf Posted June 21, 2018 Share Posted June 21, 2018 Dead sorta. I finally received my USB to TTL serial cable and was able to see it boot up. It actually powers on and gets stuck in the U-Boot bootloader. I'm not familiar with the U-Boot bootloader but if it's anything like any other bootloader it just needs to find a bootable OS image to load. Simply looking around in the bootloader's CLI it looks like there's a lot you can do in there. What this tells me though is that the hardware is potentially fine and that the Linux Kernel and OS image is missing from whatever boot device it's supposed to be on. That's something I'm still not sure about; where the OS is supposed to reside. Whether it's supposed to boot from the Micro-SD card, NAND flash, or JFFS. I get the feeling that the Micro-SD is only mounted as a persistent writeable storage location within the Linux filesystem and that it does not actually boot from the Micro-SD. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's the case since I took a closer look at the partitions on the Micro-SD and neither partition has the boot flag set on them. Anyway, I say "dead sorta" because I think this could easily be recovered by an engineer at Control4 with the OS image that needs to be loaded onto whatever memory device it's supposed to boot from. I doubt I would be able to get a copy from Control4 to load it on myself and that this is a task strictly for their engineering/technical support to do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pounce Posted June 21, 2018 Share Posted June 21, 2018 High geek factor there, but is it worth the time? These units are about $100 and are limited in their future. Did you look closely at the board to see if you let the smoke out anywhere? Actually, what lead up to the death? Just unresponsive one day or did it happen when noodling around with it or during an update? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dutsnekcirf Posted June 22, 2018 Share Posted June 22, 2018 On 6/21/2018 at 7:41 AM, Pounce said: High geek factor there, but is it worth the time? These units are about $100 and are limited in their future. Did you look closely at the board to see if you let the smoke out anywhere? Actually, what lead up to the death? Just unresponsive one day or did it happen when noodling around with it or during an update? That's a very good point, Pounce. Truth be told, I didn't have much confidence in my ability to fix this thing in the first place, so I've already paid the $100 and replaced this controller with a new one. My home automation system is back up an running. At this point I'm just being stubborn and wanting to satisfy my curiosity. Additionally, if I could fix this controller then I could upgrade one of the HC-300s in my system with this one. To answer your other questions, as far as I can see I didn't let the smoke out but that doesn't mean something isn't indeed fried. The event that lead to the death was a power outage. It was working fine and then at some point in the middle of the night we had a power outage and in the morning it was dead. So yeah, there's a very good chance there's something fried. Anyway, I doubt I'll make any progress with this but if I do I'll post back. I appreciate all the comments and help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rajiv Niles Posted January 28, 2019 Share Posted January 28, 2019 Hi dutsnekcirf, Thanks for sharing your experience. I have a similar experience with two HC250 controllers that have been in basement for many many years, and recently when trying to bring them up, they both were unresponsive to factory resets. I opened up both units and connected the serial ports and found that they get stuck at uboot and don't even go to prompt or an option to break out of autoboot, so I have no way to access any of the uboot command options. Typically, most embedded boards i have worked with, will allow you to drop into the command prompt on uboot, set up an IP address and TFTP an image that can be flashed onto the NAND flash. I am assuming with both the boxes I have that the NAND flash has become corrupted - not a 100% sure, maybe others here can confirm. If it's a NAND flash corruption, I am hoping to find a header on the board that I can use to reprogram the NAND flash, by reading an image from an existing working HC250.. Would love to know if anyone has tried anything like this. Would love to know if you had any luck in your attempts to recover your box ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.