Hey all!
I’m dealing with what seems to be a bricked OWL board on my Lich. The Gate Out light is solid red and the LCD screen is dead. It won’t show as a midi device on my Mac either. I’m hoping I can reprogram it with an ST Link V2 but need some guidance on how to connect it to the board.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!!
Hey @chris_r,
How exactly did it got into that state?
Also, do you see a USB device when you connect it to a PC? Most often a “bricked” firmware means that there’s still a bootloader that works and returns it to a state where you can flash firmware over USB MIDI. This should give you a MIDI device named “OWL-BOOT”. If there’s no MIDI device present, you certainly can flash the bootloader with an ST-Link and then flash firmware as usual.
I loaded in some patches and when I last loaded up the CT5 tap delay patch, the gate buttons flashed alternately then the LCD shut off and Gate Out led stayed on.
No midi device shows up when I plug it into my Mac either.
I had a feeling I’d have to use the ST Link to get the bootloader back in again, but I wasn’t sure how to connect it to the OWL board.
It would be very unusual to destroy the bootloader accidentally, there’s no way to overwrite it easily from firmware.
Anyway, to connect the ST-Link you might have a look the OWL1 pinout that has SWD pins at the same location as OWL2 used on Lich. You need to connect the pins labeled NRST, SWDIO, GND, SWCLK, +3V3 to the same pins on your debug probe.
You should connect the USB VBUS pin to a +5v pin with a jumper cable, and power it with USB Micro. I can send you the exact openocd command if you manage to install and run that software. Alternatively, there’s also some GUI utility from ST for flashing that you could use instead, but I’m not too familiar with it.
I’ve used the ST Link GUI before so I’m familiar with it. I want to make sure i get the proper bootloader and firmware for it 
I appreciate the help @antisvin !
Ok so it looks like this is the latest released .bin image for OWL bootloader made for Lich. It was made almost 2 years ago, but I think that there were not too many changes to its codebase since then.
Would i have to solder some pins into those 5 open spots on the left? They seem to line up with the OWL1 pinout. I tried using the 5 adjacent pins but the ST Link isn’t picking up the board in the GUI.
I managed to make a quick connect to those 5 pads, flashed the bootloader and we are good! I’ll upload the firmware and let you know how things go from there.
Everything checks out fine and the patches loaded with no issues. Thanks again for you help @antisvin. Cheers!
A quick note: I used firmware 22.0
The exact same thing has happened to me. Thank you for posting your resolution.
