Ater having his empeg stolen, my friend Dagolar purchased another one which had the dim display problem. He had already fixed another one and so he decided to try on this one as well. He replaced the fuse, and also tried to flash the empeg to v. 3.0 Alpha 11. Unfortunately, the upgrade process erases the old kernel but stops while programming the new one, and clearly the empeg does not boot.

Does anyone hve an idea of what could be going wrong? I don't even know if it can be related to the fuse replacement. What may be causing a kerne upgrade to fail?

The most common causes for a kernel upgrade failure are:

- Wrong kind of serial cable. Must be a null modem cable. Quick work around would be to use the sled instead of direct into the empeg, or vice-versa.

- Frayed serial cable. Common problem, happened to me. Buy a second cable.

- Problems with the serial port such as bad drivers, IRQ conflicts, using a crappy USB-to-serial converter. Try it on another computer.

- Using the wrong upgrade file. Try to flash version 2.0 final developer and see if that works. Don't use the alpha if you're having any kind of trouble at all.

- Corrupted upgrade file. Redownload using a download manager program.

One other item to add. Make sure that the empeg is unplugged until the upload utility says that it is searching for the player / uploading. Then plug it in.

Thank you, Tony and Paul.

Today I spoke with Dagolar and found out more details. He IS using a USB to COM converter, and he was using beta13 thinking it was the latest release (got confsed with version numbers 2.0 and 3.0) and at this point I don't know what else may be "worong".

I'll work on his empeg next wendnesday, and try to renstall everything from scratch on my laptop (which has a serial port).

2.0 Beta 13 is OK, it's almost as good as 2.0 final (and fixes the bug where the tuner won't scan), and for some reason Emplode Beta 13 is what's linked at their web site these days.

His issue is the USB to serial converter. Have him run the upgrade on another computer with a real serial port.

USB-Serial converters work fine if you use Tony's Logo Editor for kernel uploads, or if you use the Linux download.c program for them. But the Windows emplode/upgrade tools probably don't work well with them.

The ethernet-based upgrader tool is a faster way to install upgrades on machines that have a Hijack kernel -- and no serial port is required for that.

But it sounds as if you have a strategy, so run with it!

Meanwhile.. I suppose we ought to patch emplode (or is there a separate .upgrade program?) to fix the serial port bugs it has.

The problem with USB serial converters, is that they have to batch characters together into packets. The delays they introduce while collecting enough data for a packet are what confuses Emplode/tools -- those tools were written to assume no such delays. So the bug is in the tools, not the USB serial dongles, but it's a problem regardless.

If the Emplode/tools were not closed-source software, we could easily fix them. But alas..

... and of course it was the USB-COM cable (drivers?). BY just connecting Dagolar's empeg to my PC (using a real seral port) and reinstalling the software, all was fixed.

Quote:
But it sounds as if you have a strategy, so run with it!

I actually had a very simple one. Reading Tony's list of most common causes made me realize that I was for some reasons assuming that Dagolar had checked the "obvious", while instead, being Dagolar new to the empeg universe, he may have not, and understandably so. So I just told him to meet and review all his "setup".

In 5 minutes his empeg was agan up and running All's well that ends well

For the record, he was using a USBtoCOM cable with his previous empeg, successfully. That cable was stolen together with the empeg, so he got a new one (with new drivers). So it seems cable model and drivers also play a big role in all this.

Well, thank you, as usual! Dagolar's back in the empeg club, all happy.

Thanks for the update, glad he's got it working.

I might stick some notes in the FAQ in various places about USB-to-serial converters.