DJI Phantom GL300A USB Repair fix no camera view

Warning: You can damage or destroy your controller (RC) and/or the USB interface board. Attempt this at your own risk.

If your phone/tablet connected to your Phantom controller does not offer you Camera View using the DJI Go app and you are certain your USB cable is good then you may have a problem with the USB board that the phone/tablet plugs into on the back. if you examine this and determine that the physical port is fine (not broken, no bent connectors etc) then you may have the problem that many have reported, dead USB interface communication board. My case is a Phantom 3 Professional a friend owns that stopped communicating with USB connected devices plugged into his GL300A controller. I did some debugging and decided the board was not working and read online that they frequently lose their firmware either due to long periods on no use or due to a failed firmware update.

I was able to successfully reflash the firmware onto the board and get it working but struggled along the way and hopefully this video will make it easier for others to do the same with fewer hurdles.

I read a lot of web pages and browsed a lot of github repositories. If you want to get at some of the better ones, google for things like sfh_dm36x dji nandflash.

This video as crude as it is walks you through the process I went through to successfully reflash the DJI board back to life.

The base symptom as mentioned is the DJI GO app does not present the Camera button nor does it automatically know what device it is connected to.

After taking the board out of the controller and talking to it if you get the following then you may have success with this process like I did:

DM36x initialization passed!
UBL Product Vesion : DJI-GRC-UBL-1.0-rc0(2014-07-31)
Dji UBL Version: 1.51(Jul 31 2014 - 09:23:41)
Booting Catalog Boot Loader
BootMode = NAND
Starting NAND Copy...
Valid magicnum, 0xA1ACED66, found in block 0x00000019.
Valid magicnum, 0xA1ACED66, found in block 0x0000001D.
No valid boot image found!
NAND Boot failed.
Aborting...

I mention an FTDI board that is a USB to TTL level shifter needed to talk to the board from a Windows based PC. Many will work but I used this one on eBay
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/CH340G-RS232-...

The command line I used (note I am using COM6 but your COM port will vary, the video shows how to determine the port number)
sfh_DM36x -nandflash -v -p "COM6" ubl1_hdmi.bin u-boot_hdmi.bin

The putty terminal emulator used is a freeware download.
Putty settings: Serial, COMx where x is determined in Device manager, speed 115200

The video uses image files and a TI flash utility that are all contained in a zip file located at:
https://www.tjhs.ca/wp-content/upload...


Edit: 9-sept-2020
I recently had to repeat a similar process on a DJI Lightbridge board, similar procedure, but since I made this video I had built a new Windows 10 PC and the last one I was doing the video on was probably Windows 7... so a whole new flock of issues related to getting the right drivers installed. I was able to accomplish this but with a few extra hoops... may help others. If your driver install gets blocked, launch a CMD prompt as admin, CD your way to the directory with the driver install EXE file and run from the command prompt. I also ran into an issue with a DJI device not then using that installed driver and I had to manually select the driver by pointing it to the INF file the driver install told me it had installed. Did that in Device Manager, Update Driver, manually select, Have Disk, pointed to the INF file.

Edit: 24-Mar-2024
Comment from @eddyeisenberg5740 worth noting:
When you flash the firmware given by your zip files, it can only communicate with Apple devices, android devices will still remain in the same disconnected state, even with usb debugging and every cord and device I own. I only have android devices. After a week of struggling (the first time) I finally found the solution. The controller needs to be updated to 1.3.2 before it will work with android. From there is needs to be updated even more to be used, this can be done ota through the controller. My dads iphone 7 saved the day twice now. Happy flying!