Paolo RedaelliThere are a couple of cases where you would encounter a bricked board and you would have to unbrick it. A board is usually deemed bricked if:
- You can’t get to the bootloader (fastboot). This could happen when you modified the Linux kernel with a bug and you can’t reboot to fastboot mode since Android crashes on bootup.
- You are switching between a Ubuntu image to an Android image.
To get into fastboot, simply follow the steps below:
Option A
- Get a 8GB or larger SD card.
- Navigate to the “Software” page after logging in at the Inforce Techweb http://www.inforcecomputing.com/techweb/
- Find the latest SD Card Boot package that is provided and download it.
- Extract the files to find a .bz2 file, and execute bzip2 -d sdcard_boot.img_880258_V1.0.bz2.
- Insert the SD card and run dmesg to find which /dev/sdX (character device) the SD card is attached as.
- Copy the output of Step 4 to the SD card by executing sudo dd if=sdcard_boot.img_880258_V1.0 of=/dev/sdX.
- It will take about 40 minutes depending on the speed of the SD card. You can track the status of the dd command by executing sudo kill -USR1 [PID], where [PID] is found by executing pgrep -l ‘^dd$’.
- Insert the SD card into the IFC6410 board and switch all DIP switches to ON position and power up the board. It should power up into fastboot.
- While it’s in fastboot mode, flash the desired bootloader and optionally, the binaries as well. Don’t forget to remove the SD card and move the DIP switches back to OFF after flashing the board!!
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Great writeup. I have four of these boards, one of which I recently bricked. Inforce has basically orphaned these boards, which is really unfortunate because they were great. They have pulled all of the recovery files from Techweb and won’t even send you the files if you e-mail them. Oh well.
My board also broke more than an year ago. It may have been cool, but I will stick to the plain’n’simpl Raspberries… or forthcoming RiscV machines
The IFC6410s are much older than Raspberry Pi 3/4s, but they’re still better in a lot of ways. Way better connectivity. True dedicated SATA and PCIe gigabit network is a huge plus. RockPro64s are the current best alternative. Hexa-core processor, each USB port has a decided controller (not shared like on RPi), so you can run 4 HD USB cameras if you want, plus true gigabit network (not over USB), plus an open PCIe 4x slot. I’m using them for some robots right now. They blow the doors off of Raspberry Pis for less money.
But I totally agree, I’ve been closely watching (and drooling over) new Risc-V hardware. It’s still expensive and slow, but the second a decent consumer-level quad core board hits the market I’m buying it.
Since I have four IFC6410 boards lying around, and I will only ever use one or two for projects, I can send you one if you want to replace your dead one. Cover the cost of shipping and it’s yours.