I wasn’t aware I was quite that popular. Scary. :p

Firstly, working at the Terminal in Unix system, logged in as a standard user is pretty darn safe. Unlike Windows (of old) you don’t have access to delete anything but your own personal files. Hmmm. Wait a minute – that’s the most important stuff! OK. Forget I said that. :p

There are three things you need to get eePe (or companion9x, which I prefer at the moment) working on the Mac.

1. eePe itself — the Mac OS X version.
2. The Qt4 Library for Mac. (This isn’t usually included with OS X compiled versions of eePe or companion9x, as far as I know.)
3. AVRDUDE for Max OS X.

eePe for Mac OS X … I’m not sure there is a readily available Mac OS X version of eePe project site’s Downloads area or not. But I do know that eePe can be compiled for the Mac and runs well. (I’ve done it.) So there must be a readily downloadable version, somewhere. Last I checked, the same was also true of companion9x.

The Qt4 Library is used by both eePe and companion9x. You can get that from http://qt.nokia.com/. Whilst it’s theoretically possible to include just the necessary parts of Qt4 inside an eePe or c’9x application bundle (so you don’t have to install the full Qt4 library yourself) I’m not aware of anyone who has actually made it work. Personally. I prefer to have Qt4 installed on it’s own anyway. This keeps the individual application download size way smaller and helps ensure you’re running the latest version of Qt.

AVRDUDE for Mac … this can be downloaded as source and compiled, then installed. But I’m betting you don’t want to go there. Installing the CrossPack suite that I spoke of in the above article is therefore likely the easiest way to get it done. You’ll end up with everything you need to compile source code in the process, but that shouldn’t matter much.

Once all that is installed, eePe should run fine and allow you to up/download EEPROM model data to/from your radio, just as you would on Windows — only nicer.

Unfortunately I am not a that great working inside of terminal and quite frankly it scares me. So I did manage to re-flash my th9x on a pc using the smartie board programming chip and get the EL backlight installed all in one fell swoop. And so far I am loving the better firmware.

But I want to be able to install and run eepe on my mac and create files with various models and configurations on my Mac. So for someone who does not need to flash the firmware anymore and just want to plug in the TX and swap in and out eepe files what steps should I take? Hope you can help. Thanks

Out of interest, what version of AVRDUDE do you actually have and is it running on Windows, Linux or Mac? (In our case, the same fault occurred both on the Mac and under Windows 7. But I’d be curious to know, regardless.)

By the way, the -B 1 in the command line to AVRDUDE is telling the programmer to go as fast as it can (basically). You might try having it go slower — say, -B 10 — and see if that helps. If using eePe, you can add -B 10 as an addition option in the configuration screen It will override the default (usually.)

Another feature of the fault we experienced was particularly odd. Specifically, the smartieparts board would still happily program the EEPROM, just not Flash. It will be very interesting to see if the replacement does in fact work any better and therefore, whether or not there isn’t some other contributing factor.

Another possibility is that your ATmega has got itself, ‘fuse bricked’. If that is the case, then it likely isn’t running the firmware code at all any more (it won’t boot up). If that’s the case, it’s a whole other story. There is an article or two about dealing with a fuse-bricked rig on the gruvin9x and er9x project sites (in doc folders) — probably the th9x site also. (I think it’s a PDF file named something like ‘Fuse Brick.pdf’.)

You might also like to take this discussion up at Google Groups gruvin9x-discuss mailing list. There’s only a dozen or so members at last check, but someone might be able to help. You can also try the much more busy RCGroups.com ER9X threads, though I warn you there is a lot of traffic there so you better be able to read fast.

usr$ avrdude -c usbasp -p atmega64 -B 1 -U flash:w:er9x.hex

avrdude: error: programm enable: target doesn’t answer. 1
avrdude: AVR device initialized and ready to accept instructions

Reading | ################################################## | 100% 0.01s

avrdude: Device signature = 0×000000
avrdude: Yikes! Invalid device signature.
Double check connections and try again, or use -F to override
this check.

avrdude done. Thank you.

Same issues here – drivin’ us nuts. Think we foind a fix.

Diasble offline files – under Sync Centre control panel – Manage Offline Files.

HTH…

For now, I’m getting around the problem by having *everything( connect wirelessly. But this sux for transferring large files from machine to machine, so I’m not at all happy. Time to join the growing list of Belkin Haters? I sure hope not. But now that I think of it, both of the only other two Belkin products I’ve ever owned were lemons too! Uhoh …