Electronics > Repair

Help with bricked APC UPS SMT1500

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JeffWDH:
I too attempted to update a APC SMT UPS to v15 and bricked it. In my case it was a Smart-UPS 3000.
SKU: SMT3000RM2U
Manufacture Date: 11/28/2010
Revision: ID18

I can confirm that with a ST-LINK V2 and the STM32 ST-LINK Utility, along with the firmware dump of v15.0/pinout provided by AstroAU, I was able to restore use of the device. Great stuff! I had just replaced the batteries in this thing and thought I'd update the firmware as I thought APC may have tweaked the charge cutoffs to maybe help with longevity... Not sure about that but it almost snuffed the life out of it.

Current firmware versions:
UPS 15.0
MCU 11.0
UBL 08.5
MBL 11.0

Does anybody know if there are any benefits to trying to update the MCU or should I just be thankful I got this working again? I went down this path because I barely got 3 years out of my last set of batteries. Does the code contained on MCU have anything to do with charging?

jeffrond:
SMT1000RM2U ID18

Ugraded from
UPS 06.5
MCU 11.0
UBL 08.5
MBL 11.0

Upgraded to
UPS 15.0
MCU 11.0
UBL 08.5
MBL 11.0

This bricked the UPS.

I have another UPS that is already at UPS 15.0.  This good UPS has MCU and MBL at 19.0.
Testing the theory that if the MCU and MBL are upgraded to 19.0 that the UPS would work.
Swapped bad daughter board with good daughter board from another UPS. I attempted to use a 940-0127E cable from APC which did not work. It shut the unit down when connected to the laptop.  I have heard that the 940-0127E cable is not meant for the units that already have a USB port.  I connected the USB port to the laptop and ran firmware upgrade wizard.  I attempted to use firmware SMT18UPS_09-4.enc to downgrade the good daughter board from UPS 15.0 to UPS 09.4.  It started ok, but I was just getting a lot of usb connect/disconnects sounds and the firmware update wizard is at 0%.  I let it run for 2 days straight until it died.  I assumed driver issues, so I installed ApcUpsUsbDriver.zip and pcss.zip(PowerChute Serial Shutdown).  Again, I attempted firmware SMT18UPS_09-4.enc to downgrade the good daughter board from UPS 15.0 to UPS 09.4.  It worked!  In this process it upgraded the MCU and MBL to 19.0!

UPS 09.4
MCU 19.0
UBL 08.5
MBL 19.0

I used the firmware SMT18UPS_15-0.enc to upgrade the good daughter board back to UPS 15.0 and I put the good daughter board back in the good UPS.

I put the bad daughterboard back in the bricked UPS.  It is still bricked and the USB connector will not speak to the UPS.

I ordered a ST-Link clone and connected as below:

JST connector - ST Link V2 connector
  6  -   -   -   -   -   -   1
  5  -   -   -   -   -   -   6
  4  -   -   -   -   -   -   NC
  3  -   -   -   -   -   -   2
  2  -   -   -   -   -   -   4
  1  -   -   -   -   -   -   8

Started the ST-Link Utility program and changed the size to 40000 and read the bad daughter board and the good daughter board.
Editing the files with notepad++ showed obvoius differences.
Flashed the good bin file to the bad daughter board.  It works!  The unit powers up and works!  Serial number and all other information are still correct.


I had another UPS that was at UPS 06.5.  So to test, I upgraded to UPS 09.4.  This worked great.  I then upgraded to UPS 15.0.  This also worked with no issues!


Moral of the story?  For SMT1000RM2U ID18, if you are upgrading to UPS 15.0, always upgrade to UPS 09.4 first.

Major thank you to tom_e.  We spoke over emails over many days and he was always ready to help.  He helped walking me through serveral sticky wickets.  He pushed me to try the ST-Link which revived my bricked unit.  He helped with UPS 09.4 firmware.  And he was totally correct in thinking that MCU and MBL had to be at version 19.0 before upgrading the UPS to version 15.  Brilliant!
Also thanks to AstroAU for the methodology and pictures and pinouts of the JST connector to ST-Link.


I will post my file dumps here in case anyone is interested.  The file "SMT1000RM2U-v15.0-STM32F103 good.bin" is the flash I used to revive my bricked UPS.  The file "SMT1000RM2U-vxx.x-STM32F103 bad.bin" is from the bricked UPS. I put vxx.x since I am not totally sure if it is 06.5 or if it is really 15.0.  I am unsure of the legality of posting firmware here, so I will not.  But if anyone wants SMT18UPS_09-4.enc or SMT18UPS_15-0.enc or ApcUpsUsbDriver.zip or pcss.zip(PowerChute Serial Shutdown), let me know.

JeffWDH:
Thanks for posting your experience, jeffrond. I decided to risk it and try to downgrade to update the MCU/MBL:

Firmware: SMT18UPS_09-6.enc
Resulting MCU/MBL: 20.0

Then updated to SMT18UPS_15-0.enc again and was successful.

tom_e:
Great news that it is working successfully! Thank you very much for the updates!

I think that what bricked the update was going from a too old version (if UBL is anything less than UBL 08.5) to UPS 15.0. It seems to load UPS 15.0 at the wrong memory offset (0x3000 instead of 0x7000) because of the smaller bootloader.

Loading an older version first, as jeffrond and JeffWDH said, should fix this as it writes a newer bootloader to the device

JeffWDH:
For future reference I have compiled the steps I used to recover my device and some of the advice posted here.

https://www.tarball.ca/posts/unbricking-an-apc-smt3000-ups-after-a-failed-firmware-update/

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