1 Topic by driggers

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Topic: Do you really use an uninterruptible power supply to flash your board?

I read about UPS in the wikis... and I doubt people use them unless they already have one for some other purpose.  Do you really use one or do you just risk it?

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2 Reply by wardjr

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Re: Do you really use an uninterruptible power supply to flash your board?

Most boards don't require external power other than the USB.  Using a laptop with a good charged battery offers the same level of protection.

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3 Reply by driggers

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Re: Do you really use an uninterruptible power supply to flash your board?

wardjr wrote:

Most boards don't require external power other than the USB.  Using a laptop with a good charged battery offers the same level of protection.

I see.  So to flash my sanguinololu, I can just leave it unplugged from the 12V DC?  (Should I leave it unplugged from the PS if there could be a surge/cut?)

I'm going to install my E3D in the next few days, so I'm doing all the research big_smile

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4 Reply by carl_m1968

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Re: Do you really use an uninterruptible power supply to flash your board?

wardjr wrote:

Most boards don't require external power other than the USB.  Using a laptop with a good charged battery offers the same level of protection.


+1 for this.

All my flashing is done from a laptop and all my controllers are set to get power from USB during that time. So as long as the lappy is charged there is no issue with power loss. Even if there was unless you are flashing the boot loader a power failure will not hurt it. Firmware is erased before each upload so even a glitched upload gets erased before the new firmware is uploaded.

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5 Reply by jagowilson (edited by jagowilson 2016-01-28 21:04:18)

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Re: Do you really use an uninterruptible power supply to flash your board?

Even if the board loses power during flashing, this will hardly damage or brick the board. On Arduino boards at least, you are not flashing the deepest firmware on the board over USB. So even if there is a power failure, the firmware for flashing the chip again and managing USB is still in tact. The board loads flashed firmware with a bootloader. I have a project Arduino board I don't use on printers and I've flashed it thousands of times, many flashes of which were not successful for one weird reason or another.  Working just as well as the day I bought it nearly 5 years ago.

This is quite different from say flashing the BIOS on older motherboards. In those cases it is quite possible to brick the board with a bad flash or interrupted flash.

6 Reply by grob

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Re: Do you really use an uninterruptible power supply to flash your board?

Even flashing with ISP, it's practically a hardware bootloader that does the work, which you'll never be able to write over. It's even safer IMO (as we rely on Atmel's chip design to be watertight, rather than an open-source flash-memory bootloader with arduino...).

You can cause trouble with ISP by flashing bad fuse settings (e.g. reset disable or clock settings), but this can also be worked around ( HV programming and clock feeding respectively).

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