Flash_nuke on Pico Plus 2W (solved)

Support
1

I have 5 PPP2W boards, bought, I think, in 2 batches.

Three of them behave perfectly, which is to say that picotool info -d tells me the flash size, and copying flash_nuke.uf2 to them wipes all 16MB of flash and reboots to the bootloader.

However, the other two don’t. I have compiled the ‘blink’ example with the correct board type, and downloaded the resultant .elf (or .uf2) via picotool. As expected, the bright green LED does it’s thing.

I reset the board, holding down BOOT, and the board appears as a folder, /media/pi/RP2350 as expected. I copy flash_nuke.uf2, and wait. Folder disappears, but does not reappear.

After around 5 minutes I reset the board, only to see it start to blink again. So flash_nuke isn’t doing what I’d hoped.

If I use picotool to load a different elf or uf2, that works. This is the same behaviour on both of the misbehaving boards.

I can be 100% confident about this, as I have reproduced it over and over, but only on these two boards. I know it isn’t something I’ve done to the boards, as I haven’t even got as far as soldering headers in place yet, despite having had the first batch of boards for a while.

According to picotool info -a, both of the boards are A4 revision, while the other three which behave perfectly are A2 revision.

Device Information
type: RP2350
revision: A4
package: QFN80
chipid: 0xb565ff7b9a43535d
flash devinfo: 0x0c00
current cpu: ARM
available cpus: ARM, RISC-V
default cpu: ARM
secure boot: 0
debug enable: 1
secure debug enable: 1
boot_random: ba1a45f4:384832e7:a9901187:45397a9e
boot type: bootsel
last booted partition: none
diagnostic source: slot 0
last boot diagnostics: 0x00000000
reboot param 0: 0x00000000
reboot param 1: 0x00000000
rom gitrev: 0xa8bfe860
flash size: 16384K

How do you advise I wipe the flash contents?

2

If you have a LIPO battery connected, try disconnecting it. I had a similar instance on my Tufty 2350. With a battery connected flash_nuke failed to nuke my Tufty 2350.

3

I don’t, but I do know what’s happening.

Apparently there was a new release of the flash_nuke.uf2 specifically to cover this, as the version I was using was built using an earlier SDK that didn’t support A4 RP2350s. I have downloaded the updated version, and all now works as I expected. Phew!

It probably explains why initially picotool couldn’t tell me the size of the flash either.

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4

Thank’s for that info.
I think I’ll go get the latest version. ;)

5

Here’s a link to the Latest version hosted on the Pi web site. It was mentioned in an SDK issue on github which I managed to miss originally…

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