Dead Fly12?

[Dadam]

So my Fly12 CE seems to have flickered off this mortal coil. As far as I can see, completely unprovoked.

When I turn it on, the light comes on, in the intermittent flash pattern I usually choose, and the LED flashes alternate red/yellow. The manual tells me this is an error reading the SD card. There appears nothing wrong with the card, it reads fine in my laptop. It's a 64Gb formatted ExFAT. I'm going to try reformatting it in the laptop.
But what suggests to me it's gone the way of the Norwegian Blue, is it won't turn off. Hold the button down for 2 seconds and nothing happens. Light flashes, LED blinks. If I click the reset button with a pencil point (or the little screwdriver from my swiss army knife), the light goes off for 2 seconds then it just starts again.

There appear to be only two ways to turn it off. The first is to stand it on its end so it goes into incident protection mode (aka your bike is upside down in the ditch mode) for a while then switches off. The other way is eject the card and switch off with the button. This doesn't always work however.

I've tried connecting it to USB to access settings with the windows app (it stopped being visible to the phone app 2 years ago, possibly with my last change of phone). It doesn't connect, no response to being plugged in apart from the charging light coming on.

The website says the CE is no longer supported (which is really poo for a six year old device that was 200 notes). I guess I've nothing to lose trying Cycliq support anyway but not hopeful.

 

[Dadam]

As I say nothing actually happened to precipitate this. It was working, then it wasn't. It hadn't run out of charge recently. I've just fully charged it.
Looking at the files on the SD it must have happened sometime between when I last used it (24th March) and Wednesday morning when I cycled into work. Those 4 files are corrupted* and unreadable.

24/03/2025  08:37       230,686,720 CYQ_0865.MP4
24/03/2025  17:18        41,943,040 CYQ_0866.MP4
02/04/2025  07:25       461,373,440 CYQ_0867.MP4
02/04/2025  07:26        20,971,520 CYQ_0868.MP4
02/04/2025  07:26        20,971,520 CYQ_0869.MP4
02/04/2025  07:26                 0 CYQ_0870.MP4
              77 File(s) 62,767,759,360 bytes
               2 Dir(s)   1,059,454,976 bytes free

Can a zero byte file be said to be corrupted? 🤷‍♂️

 

[Dadam]

Ah, just tried to delete those 4 and Windows is still thinking about it. Could be disk corruption maybe.

 

[si_c]

Sounds like the card.

It would be easy for a corrupt SD card to crash the unit such that it couldn't turn off - it's not a power switch it just tells the software to turn the camera off and on low power consumption devices like this will be the device will only do one thing at a time - so if it's waiting for a response from the SD card then it could easily appear to crash.

 

[Dadam]

You may be right. I had to task kill, eject card and restart explorer.exe just to close that window, and I'm in the middle of something so couldn't reboot right then.

 

[Dadam]

Sounds like the card.

It would be easy for a corrupt SD card to crash the unit such that it couldn't turn off - it's not a power switch it just tells the software to turn the camera off and on low power consumption devices like this will be the device will only do one thing at a time - so if it's waiting for a response from the SD card then it could easily appear to crash.

Bad programming IMHO. Been a long time since I did any low level stuff but any call should have a timeout and some sort of exception handling.

I do wish they'd include a master power switch though. Technically I guess the reset button does that but it would cost pennies to have an actual tiny switch that you could flick with a pen point.

 

[si_c]

Bad programming IMHO. Been a long time since I did any low level stuff but any call should have a timeout and some sort of exception handling.

That depends on the processor architecture, it's a low power device rather than general purpose so possibly running some custom silicon, either way it's some form of embedded design. Chances are it blocks IO when called so not much that the developers would be able to do, if it was more general silicon it would be some embedded linux variant so the OS would handle that implicitly.

 

[Dadam]

No expert on embedded software but I'm guessing SD card read/write and USB mass storage support is probably non trivial to code. Probably built on commodity chips running linux as you say.

Anyway, next challenge is to actually repair the corruption. It crashed my work Win11 laptop. It crashed my Macbook Pro. It didn't crash my Steam Deck (SteamOS - Arch Linux derivative) but the KDE partition editor wouldn't fix it, just reported errors and gave up. Managed to delete the dodgy files though but the Fly12 still didn't work.
Went back to the work lappy, and it's currently reformatting.

 

[si_c]

No expert on embedded software but I'm guessing SD card read/write and USB mass storage support is probably non trivial to code. Probably built on commodity chips running linux as you say.

Anyway, next challenge is to actually repair the corruption. It crashed my work Win11 laptop. It crashed my Macbook Pro. It didn't crash my Steam Deck (SteamOS - Arch Linux derivative) but the KDE partition editor wouldn't fix it, just reported errors and gave up. Managed to delete the dodgy files though but the Fly12 still didn't work.
Went back to the work lappy, and it's currently reformatting.

Yeah me either, I did some embedded systems coding a long time ago so things may have moved on now, but my best recollection was that blocks were often hardware rather than software related.

Sounds like new SD card time, Linux is generally pretty forgiving when mass storage is failing which it would appear that is. A new SD card isn't too expensive though.

 

[Dadam]

Yeah me either, I did some embedded systems coding a long time ago so things may have moved on now, but my best recollection was that blocks were often hardware rather than software related.

Sounds like new SD card time, Linux is generally pretty forgiving when mass storage is failing which it would appear that is. A new SD card isn't too expensive though.

Yeah the card is toast. The format that was going on had failed. No problem with buying another, 64Gb can be had for price of a pint of beer, but didn't want to buy one on the off chance. I realised though that the indoor IP security cameras have 64Gb cards which aren't being used much. So I tried one of those and it worked a treat.

So it was just that. Should have realised earlier, I mean the flashing red/orange literally means no card or card error!

 

[si_c]

So it was just that. Should have realised earlier, I mean the flashing red/orange literally means no card or card error!

Glad it's sorted and at least the futility of your struggle isn't archived forever on the internet.