Ohai guys. It's been a while. Just wanted to drop by and update you all on this JTAG case... quick hint: everyone likes a success story.
Okay enough the fruity start to the post, good news is, I went a head and bought the parts that I showed in the 2nd post, once again amazing prices and quality.
My BlackBox 500S is up and running like a beauty. The date of the last post was 26th February, I got the box working again around 11th March. I simply don't give up, give in, and surrender to nothing, everyday after college 6hours of soldering straight, burning all fingers and thumbs. Kept the wire a maximum of 3cm, so I literally had no room to put the box I just had to hold it pressed against the back of the PC and stay steady. EVERY TIME the wires inside would either touch each other or they would simply just come off because after all they were being pulled alot. Anything over 5cm was a no-no in my case.
I try ALL options, downloaded nearly 90MB worth of JTAG tools trying each one out, and then you're only allowed 2 or 3 error attempts before you have to restart the PC. As I said I had no space so I had to disconnect the monitor cable then slide my fingers through a small gap and pry the 25-pin connector off, reconnect monitor cable, restart, login, open tools, disconnect monitor, reconnect 25-pin connector, reconnect monitor, retry. But through all that, there was a 98% chance that the wires would come off the board or they would touch, etc.
So anyway, after 2 weeks straight I just flipped it and remade the wire from scratch (I had 3ft of it anyway) but I only had the 5-resistors of course, so that was a one of chance to get right. By the through out all this hastle I managed to drop 2 big blots of solder on to the board, the first time was a complete fatal incident and the second wasn't so bad. The first time... well have a look for yourself:
The component of the right is shown with size comparison to a penny. The component is the black "101" box on the very far left of the screen near the edge (although the actual component maybe be smaller, such comparable to that of the components on the PCM board around it) (see image below).
When that came off I spent hours looking for that and thought of buying new one of them components, didn't know what it was called though, and pricing would have been ridiculous anyway but still. But then I went for the option of getting an old PC motherboard that I had lying around hoping to get a replacement component off that. It had the part but then when I was inches away from taking the solder-iron to the board, my eyes glanced upon a dot in a ball of ruined solder.....
I found the original piece. Soldered it back on. Where? Well if you look in the very first post there's a pic a posted on the BlackBox 500S motherboard, and just above and to the left of the red rectangle I drew out, you can see 2 "750" black boxes just under the writing "R115" and "R116". The component was that "750" box under "R115". When I soldered the part back on (amazingly) I went an continued on with fixing the actual JTAG cable... I know, I know...
The actual solution came by a no-no which was a 'PC running Windows 7'. The actual problem was that the old PC was too slow and so when it came to JTAGGING it, it just sat at 0% and did nothing, it didn't freeze but it didn't doing anything either. I was got 3% or 6% but that was a complete unexplainable event. So I switched to my normal Windows 7 PC, and (important) ran the JTAG tool which for me was the DOS version MANUALLY via Command Prompt, but before I initiated the right commands I set the "JtagDm500.exe" tool to "Run this program in compatibility for: Windows XP (Service Pack 2)" (by right clicking > Properties > Compatibility > ...) and viola. It did it on the first time, and fast. I forgot to change the MAC Address to a desired one by not putting in the change MAC Address commands at the time but it turned to be "a genuine DreamBox one" (00:09:34:xx:xx:xx) the 'x' were random numbers/letters so it all worked out beautifully in the end anyway.
Point being is that I went through a helluva lot of crap and pain to get this up and running.
You know, I wasn't lying about what I said in my last post about heart-ache. Moral here is: careful what you say or wish for, it may come true.
Also, I was told to sling it (the box) by
mtv1. But, meh, I'm glad I didn't.
So as I said I got it working by 11th March or something and I loaded the OpenPLI image onto it. Had all my stuff ready for the process. I've updated it with the image released on the 19th March, I can spot many things that need fixing though, and tried many versions of CCcam (sshhh...)
So here's the result:
Of course, you can see I've also got HotBird 13.0E as well as Astra 2 28.2E, running with CCcam 2.2.1.
Thanks for reading. Thank God for everything is all I can say.
P.S. This post is fruity enough to get banned for even though it's not against the rules but oh well. Worth it hehe.
Bookmarks