Updating an Old MegaDrum

[acspike]

As Fulano said in his building thread, its so difficult to find the info you are looking for when it is spread throughout the forum. So I apologize if the answers to my questions can be found in an obvious places.

I ordered a set of PCB and chips (2.7) from Synthex about a year ago and I've just now gotten around to putting it together. When I first hooked it up via usb it appeared as a midi device, but MCT didn't seem to be operating quite correctly with it and I didn't have any pads to test it with. So I wired up the LCD and was happy to see the copyright info flash. This convinced me that I didn't screw up the atmega644 chip in the build process. So I wired up a piezo element and saw the graphic eq move and eventually got midi data out of it, but still nothing in MCT. So I wired up a keypad to find the firmware version and bootloader version.

I have firmware version 20080503 and I need at least 20081006 to work with MCT.

How do I determine which bootloader I have so that I can properly configure MCT?
If MCT requires 20081006+ to work can I still use it to upgrade my firmware from 20080503? (MCT actually tells me that my firmware is newer than the version on the website! )
If not, could you please point me to instructions for the old method of updating firmware?
And lastly as I read through the release notes on past firmware versions I see some notes about incompatibilities between older hardware and newer firmware (lcd, hihat, etc.). Will the most modern firmware versions work properly with my old hardware?

[dmitri]

Since your kit is a year old you most certainly have the oldest bootloader version. But it doesn't matter since the procedure is still the same. See http://www.megadrum.info/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=622

There is no hardware changes required to use any new firmware.

[acspike]

After surfing the forum for an hour this morning I did find one thread that specifies using Midi-Ox to update the firmware for a 2.7 kit. Its hard to find this without reading every thread because you can't search for "firmware", not even if you narrow the search to just topics.

But it appears I have omitted a crucial piece of information. I'd like to do this in linux. Is this possible or should I procure a windows box?

[dmitri]

After surfing the forum for an hour this morning I did find one thread that specifies using Midi-Ox to update the firmware for a 2.7 kit. Its hard to find this without reading every thread because you can't search for "firmware", not even if you narrow the search to just topics.

But it appears I have omitted a crucial piece of information. I'd like to do this in linux. Is this possible or should I procure a windows box?

You don't need to search for the firmware update procedure, it's right on the first page of 'MegaDrum Hardware' as a sticky. The procedure applies to all versions of bootloader/firmware/kit/modules/diy/etc. If you can find in Linux a program similar to MIDI-OX, you can use the same procedure.

[acspike]

I had to search to find out that the procedure would work with my year old kit. I read all the sticky posts but I didn't know whether they applied to all historical versions of the megadrum until the following post suggested that it would viewtopic.php?f=3&t=233 .

I opted to update the firmware in windows with midi-ox. It was terribly easy and fast. Though the update process for such old firmware does differ slightly from the instructions: there was no option to choose the clock speed.

Thanks for your help!

[dmitri]

You're welcome and many thanks for the donation!