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How to revive a bricked device

Posted: 15 October 2023, 14:33 PM
by rich
I have a ZX328n that is in an infinite loop printing out debug info.
Essentially bricked.
The IDE hangs with so much data coming in.

Any ideas how i can get the chip out of its loop?

Thanks

Re: How to revive a bricked device

Posted: 18 November 2023, 1:36 AM
by kranenborg
Hi Rich,

I am a bit late to the party, but a recent revival in a ZX-based project (and my revived interest in the device) caused me noting your question:

I had a similar issue. It was caused by the fact that I applied the ClockPrescaler option with a large factor (8x for a ZX-328L): it would only print the "ZBasic v4.3.5" message in the debug window at startup and then remain deaf for anything else (including download efforts, getting the device type info from the IDE etc., so all comms were broken).

In my case there appeared to be a very easy fix however and it might work for you as well: Put power on the device only immediately AFTER you have sent the Go command (for downloading a new program). This did the trick for me as a program download is likely one of the first things your ZX-device does before it does anything else (that caused the loss of responsiveness).

I am interested to hear whether this works for you, too.

Regards,
Jurjen