Chinese Mesa 7I92 from aliexpress NEW

It may be that the Fujitsu Mini PC (like many laptops) has some
built-in power management that cannot be disabled.

 

PCW wrote:

If they did supply firmware, I would try re-writing it with:

mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 10.10.10.10 --write  vendor_supplied_firmware_file_name.bit --reload

 

My Chinese 7i98 doesn't seem to have a fallback area, so I bricked one of mine by flashing a corrupted Chinese firmware. I wouldn't try again to flash it this way.

Since then I am doing it the Chinese way:

sudo mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 192.168.1.121 --write 7i92.bit --fix --fallback
sudo mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 192.168.1.121 --write 7i92.bit --fallback
sudo mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 192.168.1.121 --reload --fallback

If the firmware doesn't work, it says: "No 7I98 board found" and only one LED is on.  So I know if the firmware is bad and I don't go further. After power cycling it, the previous firmware is loaded and it works again.

If it works (and only if it works), i continue with:

sudo mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 192.168.1.121 --write 7i92.bit --fix  
sudo mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 192.168.1.121 --write 7i92.bit  
sudo mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 192.168.1.121 --reload

Then I power cycle it and check the pins:

sudo mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 192.168.1.121 --readhmid

I've tested some original 7i92 and 7i98 bitfiles and they all work perfectly, so there is no point in using Chinese bitfiles except if the "7i92" card doesn't even look like a Mesa card and really needs a Chinese custom file. I believe, even the files supplied by the Chinese are mostly original files.

I also could flash a Chinese 7i98 fallback firmware called "7i92_fallback.bit" on a Chinese 7i92, so the 7i92 had 50 pins.
But it didn't brick, so I could flash the right firmware afterwards.




 

On Xilinx based cards you can use any working bitfile for fallback.
It wont have the blinking INIT LED indicator but otherwise the same.

This will protect against things like a power failure during flash update
It will not protect against writing firmware that does not work but has a
valid chip type and CRC (like firmware for a different card)

If you do have working fallback and a bad primary (Good CRC but does not work),
it is possible to recover without JTAG by intentionally causing an error in the primary
flash file load (say by shorting out the flash chip SDO pin briefly at power up)

Thank you for the reply, but I just flashed at least the 3.3V power regulator with 24V on the still working 7i98 instead, so it will take some time for me to do the repair. Maybe I can even program it using raspberry GPIOs then.
By that coincidence I had an EEPROM with a working firmware, which I just soldered it on the bricked card. Now it works again, but the other one doesn't.