Did you Successfully Upgrade your firmware?

[photojojo]

When you will you be getting more stock of the connector chips

You might try contacting the store crew directly as they don't get on here that much.

http://techtools.myshopify.com/pages/Contact

EDIT: The products page says they'll have more next week.

[durt wiesel]

All is good. Used a serial to USB converter cable and my PC running XP SP3, no probs upgrading the firmware, but I do agree with Djproben and TheCurse. That cable harness was a nightmare to get off. Took me 20 mins to get that badboy outa there! Luvin the new firmware, jolly good job DaveX and DJTT. Respect.

[the shmobletons]

just flashed 2 vci's to 1.4. it was a bit of a journey but well worth it. i dusted off the old pc laptop, turned it on and it wasnt lookin too good, so i gave it a fresh install of XP. next i try to download the flash kit, but of course, i only have winXP sp2, and need the sp3. so i dl the sp3 upgrade, and finally get to my first attempt. for the first flash i was getting multiple errors, but they mostly turned out to be my fault (didnt install the serial cable drivers, then forgot to power on the vci the second time, had to change the delay rate, etc etc). after about an hour i finally get the thing to flash... second vci took about 5 minutes

now to fix my mappings.... but thats gonna have to wait until tomorrow.

but until then.. all i can say is.... DISCOOOOO MODE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[DJSuizo]

The Vestax VCI-100 works with Windows 7 right? As in.. I can upgrade it from 1.3 to 1.4 via windows 7 right? I hear all you guys talking about XP!

[fullenglishpint]

The Vestax VCI-100 works with Windows 7 right? As in.. I can upgrade it from 1.3 to 1.4 via windows 7 right? I hear all you guys talking about XP!

xp is recommended but I used vista and I imagine windows 7 would work too.

[crayz5200]

Was finally successful after a lot of trouble with a cheap USB to serial cable based on the Prolific chipset and driver.
Used a mate's desktop running WinXP SP3, hooked the VCI up with a standard serial cable instead, and the flashing process zipped through on the default port (COM1)!
As serial ports aren't supposed to be hot plug technology (I think), I restarted the computer after doing the physical connections. Not sure if it was needed though.

Some comments have noted that turning the VCI on into boot mode is difficult if the buttons or jog wheels are in contact with something.
I realised that if you place the top part of the VCI on top on the bottom plate like this:

(___________________) <- top plate, upside down and PCBs facing up
[__________________] <- bottom plate

The buttons and jog wheels are suspended perfectly!
Turning the sensitivity knobs way down might help too, just in case.

Hope that helps

[dnbaddict]

Guys,

I own a black VCI-100, standard model shipped by Vestax. So no SE, and no FW1.3 installed. I guess it was 1.2 or even 1.1 (I never checked). Now I got my firmware upgrade kit, a serial-serial cable and the 1.4 FW. After following the video instructions (the cable harness is really a tough one!!), everything worked fine on my XP SP3 machine.

Through COM1, the 1.4 FW was written correctly, but after the success message in the end the software terminated itself. Is this normal behaviour?

The current status is that my VCI does not power up anymore.

Suggestions, anyone?

I found that another user faced a similar problem:

another failure on my part here.anyone got any advice?

firstly tried usb-serial with time delay, in all different usb ports and no luck, i was either gettign timeouts or did not boot errors.

so i sacked that idea, went and got a serial-serial and used a friends computer. when i ran renesas it seemed to work.... went through the process, said process complete in green writing (or something like that) and then a pop up came up from windows saying 'renesas encountered a problem etc etc, send report, dont send report' (the one that comes up normally when a programme is not responding) so i tried to run it again.. same thing happened.

put it back together to see if the firmware worked and the jog were red, but the toggle button was doing nothing. took it apart... ran the programme again and it dont the same. 'upgrade complete' 'renesas encountered a problem' and the programme closed.

now when i turn the vci on there no power to it at all.

does anyone have any advice that i can try next?

and

i was using windows vista at mines with a usb- serial. but that wasnt working... so i went to my mates who has windows XP with a serial-serial.

just tried again today, re installed renesas, went through the procedure as described and it still crashed. im now thinking that maybe its my mates computer, because its pretty old and full of programmes and random crap. im guessing this would be a reason for renesas to crash after saying 'process complete'?

im going to email the IT department in work today and see if they will let me try it in work. i'd just do it without letting them know but i need to get renesas installed on a comp and dont get admin rights in work. boo!

@allystrachan: did you find a solution?

[fullenglishpint]

Through COM1, the 1.4 FW was written correctly, but after the success message in the end the software terminated itself. Is this normal behaviour?

The current status is that my VCI does not power up anymore.

The software shouldn't terminate at the end of the process, and if the VCI isn't turning on it sounds like the firmware wasn't properly installed. Unfortunately it seems that almost any setup is capable of deleting the old FW, but it gets temperamental when installing the new one.

[dnbaddict]

Agreed fullenglishpint,

I also have the feeling that this abnormal behaviour of the flash utility is a sign of an incomplete installation of the new firmware.

I'm asking myself however why the internal routines and the parsed output of the utility announce a successful "upgrade complete" message (in green), and one tenth of a second later cause Renesas to terminate itself.

Is there any finalization of the flashing done by the utility after official completion which I am missing? Could I experiment with different settings within the utility?

All opinions are more than welcome, thx!

[photojojo]

Did you make the changes suggested in the advancedsetup.exe? I had crashing problems on mine and that's what seemed to fix it.