Bricked Xibeca Dev Kit?

[kurt]

Hello, I received a Xibeca Dev Kit (xdk | OpenWareLab) from a friend in hopes to prototype some things with a friend. It used to connect to my computer (mac m2, osx sequoia 15.7), but I tried uploading a patch to it via chrome (the “pixl_XFadeSines” one) and it immediately stopped working and got into this state of flashing button LEDs. I posted a video to youtube to show what that looks like here: https://youtube.com/shorts/4pUbVo-hjfc?feature=share

Is there a way to reset the device (either hard or soft) so that i can connect to it again and retry working with it??

Thanks in advance,
Kurt

[antisvin]

Hi Kurt,

Xibeca board doesn’t support flashing firmware from OWL’s MIDI bootloader like other OWL boards (not enough flash on that MCU) to install them both. But its bootloader allows you to enter DFU mode that is installed in MCU system flash and then you can install firmware. As an alternative to that you can short the “boot” pads on Xibeca board during board restart.

So those flashing LEDs is not something that Xibeca firmware does, this is just OWL bootloader for Xibeca indicating that it runs. I hope that you see a USB device, then you can enter DFU mode by clicking “Reset to bootloader” at this page - OpenWareLaboratory .

If this doesn’t work and you won’t have any luck with triggering DFU mode from shorting the pads on Xibeca, you can use ST-link v3 for flashing firmware.

[kurt]

Hello antisvin!
Thank you so much for your reply, I’m very grateful, even if it took me forever to respond with some updates.

I was able to start the device with the boot pads shorted, and the led lights stopped flashing.
Then I was able to connect to the device, but only on one page, not the one you gave me, openwarelab[.]org/Tools/firmware[.]html couldn’t connect, nor can I connect to the rebeltech[.]org/patch-library/device/ page (sorry, i would give real links, but this forum is limiting me to only two links per “new person”), nor to the “extended” Owl web control page. The only page that can connect is WebUSB DFU for OWL, in “DFU in FS Mode - Paired” mode.

Then I can see this:

I could not find any reference to an updated firmware for this board (are they up anywhere?), all I could find from the OpenWare github page was source code for the XibecaDevKit fw, and it took me several tries to find the most recent arm-gcc-none-eabi toolkit (downloading one at a time going back in time) in order to build it with the makefiles. (There’s no mention of the xdev kit on the openwarelab[.]org home page, and i’m trying to get as much out of openwarelab[.]org/XibecaDevKit as possible).

In any case, It eventually built sucessfully with ArmGNUToolchain 12.3.rel1. I was able to upload the firmware (.bin file, no?), but alas, it still doesn’t connect in any other way when I restart it. The only difference now is that the led buttons don’t blink.

I’m pretty clueless now what to do with it. Can you or anyone think of something else to try?
Is this device pretty much obsolete and not worth getting to work?

Sincerely,
Kurt

[antisvin]

I think you’ve figured the most complicated stuff and close to getting it to work. There were some versions of Libraries submodule that were breaking USB stuff. I.e. see this comment . If firmware built with that libraries version won’t work, I might be able to send you something else in a week or so.

Xibeca generally should be usable. I ended up not doing much with it (originally had an idea about using it for hexaphonic guitar pickups processing). I know about 2 issues that are unique to it and likely would be unsolved:

1. only 4 audio outputs work (I think all inputs worked when I tested, but I may have misunderstood this). in theory this is fixable in software, but it’s not clear why some channels were not coming through
2. some boards have problems with USB audio failing after some time. I’m not sure how many of them, just heard that Befaco had to test them to find the faulty ones, but sometimes this can occur after several hours

USB device is typically working reliably if you build firmware with libraries version were it’s not broken. USB host has only been fixed to reconnect successfully in latest firmware version(s), but my experience is that it often doesn’t initialize successfully (and then it won’t reconnect at all). However, this behavior is the same in OWL3 and Xibeca.