Do you have the orange solid LED all the time? Even you reset the board - it is there?
And bootloader does not work? And external debugger cannot access to target?
BTW: if you have external debugger connected but it holds board in reset - you will get also a solid orange LED (but not broken, just too long in reset).
Watch what the external debugger console reports as the target voltage: potentially, it will show a very low voltage (in mV range, not 2.9 ... 3.1V needed for MCU): the board does not not power enabled.
In this case: your PMIC (onboard Power Management IC) does not provide power for all the components onboard (PMIC is not configured).
It looks to me: there is a tiny timing window where a FW which has booted has to initialize PMIC. If board hold in reset - startup power fades away.
The way I can recover from it:
- Have another MCU with I2C read/write features (commands) - e.g. I use a second Portenta H7
with special command to do I2C PMIC config. - connect I2C from this external MCU to Portenta I2C (but the right I2C where the PMIC is connected inside board)
- program the PMIC registers via I2C - the power should come back, the orange LED off
- flash the bootloader again with the external debugger
The board is not really broken: it has just lost the bootloader (or any FW booting) which will initialize the PMIC. Overwriting the bootloader will cause this issue.
You need a breakout board to recover (access via I2C and debugger).
Here is a drawing illustrating how to do - with an external debugger connected:
If you do not have external debugger: via BOOT option and an USB-A cable on breakout board:
possible to recover bootloader via dft_util.exe:
If you have another MCU with I2C (as 3V3) or a PC with an I2C adapter (e.g. TotalPhase Aardvark):
