Mac 301 (JB Lighting A7) upgrade dongle

[electronicsuk]

Evening all. It's a long shot, but would any kind forum member have a Martin Mac 301 (or JB lighting) software upgrade dongle they'd be willing to take the cover off and photograph? I have some Mac 301s that I'd like to do a SW upgrade on but I don't have the update dongle and the fixture is discontinued. In any case the update isn't a necessity but a nice to have, so I don't want to spend a fortune on getting hold of one.

 

It's obvious from the drivers packaged with the uograde software that the OEM dongle uses the popular FTDI chip. I took a punt on an RS-422 FTDI dongle as the Martin documentation says a 5 pin cable is required for the upgrade, so it would make sense that one cable pair is being used as transmit and the other receive. The receiver board inside the fixture clearly has two sets of transceivers. That doesn't work and now I'm wondering if it's actually just bi-directional RS-485 over pins 4 and 5, but I don't fancy buying another interface on a whim. A photo of the PCB inside a genuine uograde dongle would answer a lot of questions for me!

[Tomo]

Just borrow one!

 

The major hire companies will have them to maintain their own stocks of Martin fixtures.

They'll almost certianly hire one out for considerably less than you've already spent trying to build your own.

 

A friendly local might even be willing to lend you theirs for beer money or less.

 

There are a lot of reasons why it might not be working, not just the pinout.

RS422 is electrically very similar to RS485, so that (probably) isn't the issue.

A photo is really unlikely to help, you'd need an actual schematic and (assuming it is FTDI) the actual configuration of the FTDI chip.

[electronicsuk]

Thanks Tomo, didn't even consider hire companies but it sounds like a good shout. I wasn't aware there were different configurations of the FTDI hardware beyond the physical interface, so perhaps the upgrade software is looking for a specific ID from the hardware.