Not able to flash Jetson Orin NX module with A603

Hello!

I have been trying to flash a Jetson Orin NX module mounted on a A603 carrier board, and I have not been able to succeed. I tried flashing process on two different computers and it always get stuck in the flashing step. I have followed each step in the Seedstudio wiki https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/reComputer_A603_Flash_System/.

I did all the steps for flashing JP5.1.2. using two different host computers, both running Ubuntu 20.04. I can always see the Nvidia device using lsusb command, so I assume they are in recovery mode whenever I try flashing.
Tried different micro USB cables, all of them are used for communicating serially with other devices, so they are working. The SSD mounted on the carrier board is the same mode which we use on other A603 carrier boards. I have tried at least two new A603 carrier boards. All of these suggest the possibilities of hardware issues are the least.

Below are some of the relevant logs while flashing.

[   4.5309 ] Added binary blob_camera-rtcpu-t234-rce_sigheader.img.encrypt of size 537952
[   4.5311 ] Added binary blob_adsp-fw_sigheader.bin.encrypt of size 400960
[   4.5312 ] Added binary blob_spe_t234_sigheader.bin.encrypt of size 270336
[   4.5314 ] Added binary blob_tos-optee_t234_sigheader.img.encrypt of size 1064752
[   4.5315 ] Added binary blob_eks_t234_sigheader.img.encrypt of size 9232
[   4.5385 ] Sending membct and RCM blob
[   4.5402 ] tegrarcm_v2 --chip 0x23 0 --pollbl --download bct_mem mem_rcm_sigheader.bct.encrypt --download blob blob.bin
[   4.5422 ] BL: version 0.32.0.0-t234-54845784-57325615 last_boot_error: 0
[   4.7442 ] Sending bct_mem
[   4.9597 ] Sending blob
[   4.9934 ] ERROR: might be timeout in USB write.
Error: Return value 3
Command tegrarcm_v2 --chip 0x23 0 --pollbl --download bct_mem mem_rcm_sigheader.bct.encrypt --download blob blob.bin
Failed flashing t186ref.

I tried to flash only on the EMMC to see if there is any issue with the SSD with below command
sudo ./flash.sh p3509-a02+p3767-0000 internal and it is also failing in the same way.

There are two main things I suspect.

  1. Is the board number correct? Is it the one as specified in the wiki or should I use p3768-0000+p3767-0000 ? I have tried this and the output is the same.
  2. Is there any dependency on the host device? Especially regarding the USB port? I have had a similar issue before, and I could flash from a different computer, it was a desktop computer, and we had to connect to the USB port on the back side to get the flashing proper.

I hope I would get some leads to fix this issue, otherwise we will have to try another carrier board. Let me know if the full logs are required.

Thank you!

Hi!

I managed to flash the board. So I thought to share a bit about it here.

I used a different host computer to flash and it worked. I followed the same steps as in the wiki. This different computer is a very old Fujitsu laptop running Ubuntu 18.04.

What I don’t understand here is why the flashing process failed with other computers (which are relatively new and have better specs, running Ubuntu 20.04). Does it have to do anything with the hardware (specifically USB), or the OS or the kernel (one of the machines is with version 5.15.0-125-generic)?

I think it is good to understand why the process fails on some machines, and succeeds on others. Any insights would be helpful and appreciated.

Thank you!