Taranis X9-Lite won't turn on (Please help!)

[jestertrain]

Hi, newbie here.. I got my X9-Lite a long time ago and it never worked. The screen won't turn on, the light on the power button won't turn on, and basically it's dead.

At firs I thought it was the batteries. Saw some peoples radios got some small coin between the 18650 batteries, since I didn't get one, I've figured I don't need it.. The batteries are fully charged.

I do here the click inside when I plug it into my PC. Here's what I tried already:

-At first the STM32 driver wasn't installed on the PC, then I fixed it (showing as "STM32 BOOTLOADER" on device manager under "Universal Serial Bus devices").

-Downloaded OpenTX Companion 2.3.15, changed to the X9-Lite in the settings and downloaded the latest firmware. When I tried flashing it wrote :

File downloaded successfully

No valid DFU suffix signature

Warning: File has no DFU suffix

I saw the guide on re-flashing though because it doesn't even turn on and the companion fails I don't know what to do. I thinks it's a very rare problem and I would hate buying a new one before trying everything...

 

[jseyfert3]

You said it never worked. Did you buy it used?

This sounds somewhat similar to what happened when I tried upgrading my new X9D+ from Companion when I didn’t have the STM32 driver installed. After the firmware “flashed” the radio wouldn’t boot. IIRC I would hear a faint “click” noise if I tried to turn it on or plug it in and the power light came faintly.

I fixed this by downloading the STM32 driver and flashing from Companion again. My post from earlier this year mentions “putting the battery back in” after flashing. It’s not required to remove batteries to flash that I’m aware of but maybe for some reason if stuff isn’t right from a bad flash it needs to be flashed with the batteries removed? Seems like an odd thing, but worth a shot I guess. I also mentioned I recovered using method 3 on some site but the linked site is no longer there!

My previous post on this:
https://forum.alofthobbies.com/inde...yet-and-already-loving-opentx.2744/post-33026

Will the radio boot to bootloader mode? Hold both horizontal trim tabs towards the center of the radio and power it on. If it can boot to bootloader mode then flashing is easily done by loading the firmware on an SD card and I can walk you through that process. If not we’ll have to try to find the info I linked which was how to recover a “bricked” OpenTX radio.

 

[jseyfert3]

Ah. The Wayback Machine to the rescue. They archived the webpage. Basically Method 3 is done if the radio won’t boot even into bootloader mode. For that they recommend removing the battery, so that’s why I did that.

Method 1 is just booting to bootloader and flashing from Companion as normal.

Method 2 is booting to bootloader and flashing a firmware file that’s been placed on the SD card.

Method 3 is when you can’t even boot to bootloader. This involves connecting to a computer with the radio off (hence the recommendation to remove the battery probably) which uses a different flashing method (DFU) than the normal flashing method when the radio is on and in bootloader mode.

This appears to be what you did, but since the instructions recommend removing the batteries, maybe remove them and try again?

Double check you have the correct radio selected in your radio profile on Companion.

Unbricking Taranis Radios with OpenTX Operating Systems

A ‘bricked’ radio is one that is seemingly dead. In most cases, a radio in a bricked state will not respond to the user at when trying to power on the radio

web.archive.org