Pinout for HP LFF ML310e/ML350e Gen8, ML30 Gen 9 disk cage

I need an small external storage (4-6 3.5″ disks) for home server and initially was thinking about buying external disk enclosure with SAS interface. However despite the fact that they do exist, I was unable to find one for reasonable price. Just a case for 5.25″ costs around €80, so I decided to try make DIY external enclosure.

First thing needed is a drive cage, I’ve found that cages for ML310e/ML350e looks suitable and was able to buy one for around €50.
I got 674790-002 hot-plug version (686745-002 is not-hon plug version, I would pretty happy to get non-hot plug version but they were more expensive that one I got).
Looks like HP put something similar in HP Micro server gen 8 (at least caddy from microservers fits into cage):

The disadvantage of hot-plug cage is unknown pinout. It’s simple board, from my understanding it provides power for disks (without conversion) and data connection (without expander):

Here is power connector:
I used multimeter to just poke around the board and find traces from power to SAS power connectors, also I used photos of HP 822606-001 10 pin to 8 Pin connector, just to get a clue about 2 unknown pins.
Here is my findings:
Pin 1 – Unknown
Pin 2 – GND
Pin 3 – Unknown
Pin 4 – 5V
Pin 5 – GND
Pin 6 – 5V
Pin 7 – 12V
Pin 8 – GND

An interesting observation, pin 1 is not used by HP’s 10 pin to 8 pin adapter. Trace leads to small 2 pin connector and to component D2 (probably protection diode pair), which is close to Q1 ( transistor pair?) and U1 (most likely LDO).

Pin 3 – connected to an op-amp’s (TSV912AIDT) non-inverting input. That pin is used in 10 pin to 8 pin adapter (gray wire). That op-amp close to i2c EEPROM ATMLH602 and un-populated U5:

EEPROM’s i2c bus connected to un-populated U5, from which two traces go to SAS connector (sideband ?). I wonder why they left unconnected EEPROM on board? In that way HP will not be able to do their vendor lock or blackmail you into buying a subscription so that the equipment you bought will continue to work.

So I have no idea what is pin 1 for. It doesn’t look like power-on pin, because here is no power transistors. I have no idea what pin 3 is doing and why they need op-amp. It may be amplifier for thermistor for temperature monitoring, but again it makes little sense because pin connected to input of amplifier and it looks quite strange to use analog signal for that.

PS
One more curious observation, 3.3V on SAS  power port are unconnected

PPS
EEPROM

The story of how I spent the evening enableing TMC2208 spreadCycle on Creality 1.1.5 board

I have ender 5 which come with creality 1.1.5 board with one little surprise, Marlin’s linear advance doesn’t work on it (klipper seems not to be happy too).
The reason is TMC2208 drivers which are in default stealthChop mode which doesn’t work well with rapid speed and direction changes.

TMC2208 is highly configurable in comparison to old drivers like A4988, but it utilizes half-duplex serial interface. Also it has default configuration stored in OTP (one time programming memory) which again may be changed via serial interface. So, here is two options, connect TMC2208 to onboard microcontroller  and let Marlin/Klipper to configure TMC2208 or change OTP.
It’s not so easy to find spare pin on this board (at least I thought so), so I decided to change OTP register.

Serial interface is exposed on PIN14 (PDN_UART) of TMC2208 chip:
TMC2208 package

On popular stepstick type drivers which looks like this:

This pin is exposed and easily available, but it’s not the case. On Creality 1.1.5 board these drivers integrated.
I didn’t found the schematic for revision 1.1.5, but I’ve found PCB view of older revision. I’ve visually compared traces, vias, elements and designates around driver and found them very similar if not the same.

There is PCB view of extruder’s driver:

Extruder's driver

And there is a photo of board I have:

Creality 1.1.5 board

The needed PIN 14 is connected to PIN12 and 10K pull-up resistor.

To change OTP register I needed half-duplex serial and I had three most obvious options out of my head:

  • Use usb to serial adapter and join TX and RX lines
  • Use separate controller and do bing bang thing
  • Use onboard controller and just upload an arduino sketch to do the same (or even use TMC2208Stepper lib to just write OTP register)

I had no spare arduino around and wasn’t sure that will be able to get access to Marlin’s calibration stored in EEPROM and decided to use the first option (it didn’t work well and here is few different reason why which I will write at the end).

First you need ScriptCommunicator to send commands to TMC2208 from there: https://sourceforge.net/projects/scriptcommunicator/
Next, you need to get TMC2208.scez bundle from there: https://github.com/watterott/SilentStepStick/tree/master/ScriptCommunicator
Download them somewhere, they will be used later.

The solution for making half-duplex from usb to serial adapter which is in top of google result looks like that:

And here is my initial implementation:

Half-duplex implementation
Resistor is just pushed into headers which are connected to RX and TX, only wire connected to RX is used to communicate with TMC2208.
My first idea was to solder wire to R24 (I need to enable spreadCycle only for extruder’s driver) and use usb to serial adapter like this:

1st attempt to solder wire directly to R24

The whole construction (5V and GND were connected to ISP header’s pins 2 and 6 respectively):
FTDI to Creality board connection

When everything ready, there is time to open TMC2208.scez, I used the version for linux, so for me it was command like:

/PATH/TO/ScriptCommunicator.sh /PATH/TO/TMC2208.scez

But unfortunately it didn’t work. Each time I hit connect button I got a message “Sending failed. Check hardware connection and serial port.” First I tried to lower connection speed (TMC2208 automatically detects baudrate, 115200 was configured in TMC2208.scez), but without positive result. Next I was checking all the connections between FTDI, resistor and TMC chip – no success. Un-pluging VCC from FTDI and powering board with external PSU – no connection.

I started to think what can went wrong, the fact that old  board revision for A4988 drivers looks pretty similar made me think that creality just put new chip in place of old one and here is obvious candidate INDEX PIN(12) which is connected to PDN. According to datasheet  INDEX is digital output, so if it is push-pull, it will definitely mess with serial communication. Only option to fix it is to cut trace between them and solder wire directly to PDN. Luckily it’s just two layer board, so needed trace can be easily located on the back side:

Cut like that:

Back cut PDN to INDEX trace

And solder wire. Wire should be thin and soft otherwise there is a risk to peal off trace completely. Also it’s worth to check that here is no connectivity between wire and R24 after soldering:

Back of the board, wire soldered to PDN

I thought that I would finally be able to configure TMC, but to my surprise only change I observed was an checksum error message which I got time to time instead of “Sending failed”.
It was around 1:30 after midnight and I almost gave up, when recalled in the very last moment that I have CH341 based programmer. I give it a try and finally it worked:

Configurator finally connected
Only additional change I made, I powered board from external supply, because it was easier than searching for 5V on programmer:
CH341 connected to board

Next to change of OTP (step by step video may be foun there).

OTP bits can be changed once, that action is irreversible additional attention is needed there.

On “OTP Programmer” tab the byte #2 bit #7 should be written to enable spreadCycle mode. After that driver goes to disabled state, until “duration of slow decay phase” is configured to some value other than 0. For me it’s still opaque which value should be written, the SilentStepStick configurator suggests value 3, the same value used as default for stealthChop mode. Without having better ideas I wrote the same, first 4 bits of byte #1 controls  duration, to write value 3,  bit #0 and bit #1 should be written.
Complete sequence is below:

Byte 2 bit 7 Byte 1 bit 1 Byte 1 bit 0

To make sure that OTP configured correctly, it’s needed to click “Read all Registers” button on “Register Settings” tab (not sure why on my screenshot I have OTP_PWM_GRAD equals 2 probably I made screenshot after writing only byte #1 bit #1):

Read OTP bits

Or disconnect and connect to driver again, “Tuning” tab should have enabled spreadCycle and TOFF set to 3:

Mission complete

PS

Looking back, I see that here is not so much sense in changing OTP in that way or doing it at all.
First  making half-duplex serial just by connecting TX and RX with 1k resistor seems wrong. Atmel’s app not AVR947 suggest that it should looks like that:

Correct half-duplex joining

Which makes more sense and explains strange voltage around 2.8V I saw on PDN pin when I was troubleshooting FTDI. Possible explanations why FTDI didn’t work for me is that CH341 has different  threshold/voltage levels or has pull-up or my FTDI was partially damaged after series of unfortunate incidents.

Next if for some reason OTP should be changed, it’s easier to use MISO, MOSI or SCK pin from ISP pin header and make arduino sketch.

And finally, there I found that board has partially populated 3 PIN footprint, unused pin connected to pin #35 (PA2) of atmega installed on the board. Without  bltouch it’s the easiest option to have constant connection between controller and driver, which allows to use dynamic configuration. Even more with klipper it’s possible (but don’t know why) to have constant connection to each driver and even have bltouch by using SCK, MOSI, MISO (bye sdcard), BEEPER and PA2:

Unused GPIO

So far I have no bltouch, so even with configure OTP I’m going to solder a wire from PA2 to PDN just to have an option adjust driver configuration on the fly.

Thank for reading.

How to fix “Encryption credentials have expired” on xerox b215

Looks like I have new hobby  donated by xerox (if you can avoid greedy lying xerox, do it) – fixing my printer.
This time it just suddenly stopped to work with message “Encryption credentials have expired”. Previously I saw an option ‘Create new certificate’ on printer’s web page and my assumption was that probably certificate installed on printer was expired. At least I faced with that issues on embedded hardware like BMC’s many times, I tried to click on ‘Create new certificate’ button but it didn’t helped.
Let’s say thank you to xerox engineers and launch wireshark to figure out what happened. When I tried to resume print queue I saw communication on port 631 (IPP), which I able to decode as TLS in wireshark. openssl s_client shown expired certificate. Here is no option to uppload own key and certificate, but here is an option to downloads certificate signing request under Properties->Security->Machine Digital Certificate. So, I just created CA certificate:

$ openssl req -x509 -sha256 -days 3650 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout rootCA.key -out rootCA.crt

Signed it using the next config:

$ cat > ./printer.conf << EOF
authorityKeyIdentifier=keyid,issuer
basicConstraints=CA:FALSE
subjectAltName = @alt_names
[alt_names]
DNS.1 = printer
DNS.2 = printer.local
IP.1 = 192.168.1.1
EOF
$ openssl x509 -req -CA rootCA.crt -CAkey rootCA.key -in PRINTER_request_sslCertificate.pem -out printer.crt -days 3649 -CAcreateserial -extfile printer.conf

And uploaded to printer.
Bonus point for SAN.

Test of 5 AC-DC PSUs cheaper than $1.5

I need  220AC to 5V PSU for exhaust fan controller, the trickiest part – it should be as small as possible. The main load is LEDs, same time supplied voltage should be clean enough for analog to digital conversions doing by attiny85. So I bought and test 6 different PSU. Because of seller mistake one of them turned up to be 220 to 12V PSU, so only 5 of them were tested.

TL;DR
All of them produces awful output exception of #1 and #3 (hilink)
The winner is #1, it’s one of the smallest (12X25X18 mm), one of the cheapest ($0.77), rated at 5V 700mA power supply.
No one of them (with exception of hi-link) doesn’t look safe enought to be treated as galvanic isolated PSU.
Here is a table for quick comparison, but out of the box (without changing capacitors or adding filters), only #1 and #3 worth to buy:

Continue reading

Repairing of kitchenaid phase control board

It’s a story how I spent thee days troubleshooting 9 elements circuit when 7 of them are passive. I didn’t found what’s wrong, but fixed it.

Foreword:
I have  control board marked as W10354309, it’s European 220V model of phase regulator.
I wonder which logic behind kitchenaid’s parts marking, I found several part numbers for 220V version: 3184417, 4163707, 4163712, 9701269, 9706596, W10217542, W10538289, W10911442, W11174552, WPW10538289
(110V version have same idea and same schematic, just different values and ratings for some elements)
I don’t know why they do that. Probably because they use the same part on different models and/or under different brands.
So, I have 5ksm125 mixer and W10354309 phase control.

Service manual says, that at the first speed planetary shaft should have near 60RPM, but in my case it had near 120RPM and I was unable to decrease it by tuning control plate.

Here I should make a digression, these mixers have ability to maintain constant RPM under different load.  I was surprised when I learn how do they do that. One of the main component comes right from the steam engine era, it’s centrifugal governor which is placed on the shaft of the motor, here it is:

Yellow thing is the governor itself, black cylinders highlighted with green – weights, central pin stroked with blue is a pin which provides feedback to control plate. It works simple, the more RPM motor have the more pin extends.

Next component is so called control plate, in fact it has simple main switch and a T shaped contact. The main switch  just break circuit when you move switch lever to off. T-contact plate just shorts contacts on a plate in 3 different configuration. The white tab on a picture above is a dielectric tab on T-contact, governor’s central pin pushes this tab and changes which contacts are closed on control plate. Here is control plate from the other side:

And the last component is a phase control board, it’s basically dimmer if you google for ‘dimmer circuit’ you will find the same scheme as used in phase control board with one exception, usually dimmers have variable resistor for smooth regulation, phase control board has resistors network in which resistors shorts by control board in 3 different configuration. You can see it  behind top edge of contral board on the picture above and on closeup photo on picture below:

So, how its work together? Here is schematic from repair manual with comments and nominals added by me:

As I sad before control plate can be in 3 different states:
The first: the motor has too low RPM or doesn’t turn at all. T-contact fully closed, it shorts resistor network (R1, R2, R3, R5) completely and feeds motor with almost full sine wave (DIAC Q2 opens at around of 30V, so the start of the wave is chopped a little bit)
The third: the motor has too much RPM. T-contact fully opened, resistors network has maximum resistance,  phase control board feeds motor with minimum amount of energy (manual says that it should provide 40V RMS, I don’t understand why it’s true for both 110V and 220V version, but looks like it is).
The second: this state is somewhere in between too low RPM and too much RPM, control board shorts R1, equivalent resistance is ((R5+R3)* R2)/(R5+R3+R2), manual says that it should provide 80V RMS.

The more RPM motor have, the more central pin of centrifugal governor extents, the more it shift T-contact. When T-contact shifting, it opens circuit with bottom contact first and with upper contact next (check schematic above). When you select mixer’s speed you change distance between control plate and governor, the more distance it has the faster motor should spins to get equilibrium between the first and the third states.

Finally I can tell about my issue.
Usually when phase control is broken mixer doesn’t cho-cho at all or doing it on max speed, my story was slightly different, it had near 120 constant RPM on the first 3 speeds, next speed or two  increased RPM to the maximum, and other speeds did nothing.

When I saw schematic, I was pretty sure that I just need to replace DIAC. In circuits like this, if something works wrong in 99 cases of 100 it caused by broken semiconductor. When TRIAC failed it usually stays open or shorted (motor shouldn’t run at all or run at full speed).

I changed DIAC but  nothing changed, motor had RPM above nominal, but not the maximum. RPM was enough to extent governor’s central pin to the maximum and open both contacts on control plate.

The next suspect was TRIAC, here is only two semiconductors, if one of them is OK, the other one is broken, right? Wrong. I tried two different TRIACs without success. BTA12-600SW (it has the same characteristics like original one. Logic level gate, gate’s current 10mA , snuberless, but rated for 12A instead of 6A) and BTA06-600CW ( it isn’t logic level and had gate current around 35mA, it produced visible sparks during re-commutations on control plate, so don’t use it).

What should be suspected next? Capacitors? Both had less than 5% difference of capacitance from their nominals. I tried other capacitors, RPM of motor changed, but not significantly (in theory failed capacitors may have noticeable different capacity under high voltage, but I tested them with low voltage LCR meter).

After that I started to go crazy, I even de-solder every resistor, but they had correct values.
I spent near 3 days trying to find what’s wrong.
I had a lot of theories: failed resistor which heats when voltage applied and changes its resistance, semi-broken wires, semi-broken motor etc.
I even found a topic in which people had the same issue, but no one find the solution: https://www.electronicspoint.com/forums/threads/kitchenaid-mixer-phase-control-board-problem.241021/page-2

Soon after I started my experiments, I found that everything works as expected when I put R4 with increased value, but I wanted to find why circuit which had right elements didn’t work as it should.
At the end of the third day I gave up. I tried to replace every resistor, every capacitor in circuit and it didn’t helped, I tried to solder wires in parallel with existent,
In the end I decided to put 3.6KOhm R4 instead of original 560Ohm.

Here is my observations:

  • Manuals says that you can check phase control by putting sheet of non conductive material (like papper) between T-contact and contact which it touches, if it’s OK it should provide around 40V, but I got 50V. When I lovered voltage to 40V I got response from control plate regulation.
  • Motor starts spinning at around 9V DC.
  • Coils of stator has resistance of 7.8 Ohm each, rotor has resistance near 4 Ohm between nearest contacts, resistance of motor (between red and white wire) near 40 Ohm.
  • Circuit is sensible to element’s values, even when I tried to put capacitors with the same value I got slightly different RPM. My circuit has 1% R5, old scheme from manual has 3 resistors in series, usually this approach used when resistors have breakdown voltage less than voltage drop on them or when you want to use few cheap 5% 10% resistors instead of precise one.
  • Probably phase control boards with  different part numbers more stable. I found photos of others boards and saw that resistors have values different from values that observed. Here is an example from amazon:

Simple temperature controlled fan regulator

Some time ago I pulled out temperature fan controller from one of old ATX PSU.
With 12.2V input it provides 4.5V at 25°C and raises output voltage till 11.8V at ~70°C. After changing Q2 to higher voltage transistor and tuning of R4-R5 this divider this controller should be suitable for 12V fans with 24/36/48V input.
Here is result of my reverse engineered schematic:

One and a half port charger on TP5100 module

WARNING: Lithium batteries can be extremely dangerous when handled unproperly and lead to fire hazard. Information provided as is, you can use it on your own risk.

Before last holidays I bought cheap Chinese action camera, which came without separate charging station. Camera’s battery could be charged only in camera, charging batteries via which have few cons:

  1. You can damage camera port
  2. If you have more than one battery, you can charge only one at time
  3. You need to watch charging process and change batteries
  4. The last cons depends on camera, but usually compact devices use charger IC with linear regulation and they have low efficiency. If you don’t have access to electrical line and you bound to use power banks, efficiency could be critical.

It’s turned out that a lot of cheap cameras use battery in the same form-factor, thus I decided to share my charger.
I think the most popular solution for single-cell DIY Li-Ion chargers is TP4056 module. It’s almost plug and play solution, usually it have USB port and protection circuit, but it uses linear regulation, so it have low efficiency. Since efficiency is critical for me, I choose TP5100 module, unfortunately it comes without USB port, but it based on buck topology and should be much more efficient than TP4056.
Unfortunately these modules come without USB port (at least I didn’t found TP5100 with USB port).

Thus that project was separated in two main tasks: design carrier board with USB port and design case for charger.

Carrier board is extremely simple, it contains only Micro-USB port and place for TP5100 module.

Case also has simple design, only curlpit which I had – contacts. I made them from nickel plated strips, which I bent once to make it bit thicker:

First I had design where contacts should be inserted from side, but it was nearly impossible because of  small gap between side wall and battery holder wall. I redesigned the case in a way when contacts inserted from bottom, un-fortunatelly I didn’t take into account that wires should be soldered from bottom, so supports under contacts should be re-designed or partially melted with solderer as I did it.
To make contacts stiff I glued them in. If they not feet freely into dedicated slots, use solder iron to melt them into slots.
Before gluing them into place, you should be sure that they are long enough and battery fits properly. I supported contacts with fingers during tests. If they have right size, battery should ‘click’ into slot. My batteries stayed in place even when charger with batteries was turned upside-down.

Upper case was printed in with ‘transparent’ plastic, so I can see status led soldered on charger module:

Here is start most interesting part. TP5100 can charge two cells connected to serial, but cells will not be balanced. With a camera I frequently have one partially depleted battery and one fully depleted battery, so I cant charge them in serial configuration without balancer.
Same time it’s not recommended to connect in parallel batteries which discharged un-equally, because current which will flow between batteries will be limited only by resistance of wires and internal resistance of batteries itself.
For myself I decided that it’s acceptable risk because of next reasons:

  1. Batteries like that is not high current, so they should have relatively high internal resistance which will limit current
  2. I especially use thin wires, which have their own noticeable resistance
  3. Contacts also have noticeable resistance
  4. When one battery charges another their potentials aligns. The less difference in voltage the less current flows
  5. I’m planning to connect batteries only when charger powered up, so up to 1A from charger will aligns their potential.

When I did the charger, I connected fully charged battery with battery which was just discharged by camera and measured the current, it was near 0.17A. Batteries like that should be ok at 1C current (0.9A in my case).
I will not agitate anyone to do the same, but I find it ok for myself.

Two more precautions, this charger can be connected only to chragers which are provide more than 1A current. Newer connect that charger to laptop or PC.
TP5100 usually come with maximum charging current set as 1A. If you put 1 battery, it’s a bit more than 1C (0.9A in my case), but I didn’t observed any noticeable warming of battery during charge cycle, so you can set charge current lower or use it with 1A on your own risk.

Here is stl files for  case
Board files: board

Upgrade XTLW3 with MKS Sgen_L & smoothieware

I own XTLW3 3D printer which come with MKS Gen_L  8 bit board and MKS MINI12864 display, out of curiosity I decided to try 32 bit board, one of the cheapest option is MKS Sgen_L  board. Earlier I used marlin firmware on gen_l board, but sgen_l come with smoothieware, so I decided to give it a try.

Looks like the most important advantage of smoothie firmware in comparison with marlin is ability to define your machine settings without re-compiling firmware. You can configure axis resolution, endstops, etc via regular text config file on a sdcard. That approach helps to fix mistakes during configuration or make experiments easily without re-compiling and re-flashing firmware.
Few weeks ago I mounted 3Dtouch sensor (BLtouch’s chinese copy), but I delayed moment of connecting it, anticipating related problems with re-configuring and re-flashing Marlin. Thereby it  was perfect moment to try new firmware.

There MKS provides example config which partially fits my printer, I managed to make it work and here is notes which may be helpful to somebody:

End stops and physical boundaries should be defined, my printer have end stops placed at minimal position for X&Z axis and at maximal position for Y axis. All of them are Normally Opened and connects sense pin to ground when activated, so pull up should be enabled. In XTLW3 hotend nozzle is not above print bed, because end stops misaligned. For me it’s even better, because I made printer dumps small amount of plastic during init procedure paste the table, in that way it doesn’t lie on the bed.
Here is my part of config for end stops and boundaries:

# Limit switch setting
endstops_enable true
soft_endstop.enable
soft_endstop.halt           true   # Whether to issue a HALT state when hitting a soft endstop

## X-axis
alpha_min_endstop 1.29^!
alpha_homing_direction home_to_min
alpha_min           -2
alpha_max           220
soft_endstop.x_min  1
soft_endstop.x_max  220

## Y-axis
beta_max_endstop 1.26^!
beta_homing_direction home_to_max #
beta_min -3
beta_max 224
soft_endstop.y_min          1
soft_endstop.y_max          220

## Z-axis
gamma_min_endstop 1.25^!
gamma_homing_direction home_to_min #
gamma_min -3 #
gamma_max 280 #
soft_endstop.z_min          1            # Minimum Z position
soft_endstop.z_max          285          # Maximum Z position

BTW, you should not exceed 132 characters per line. Also smoothieware uses different naming for axes in comparison with Marlin. For Cartesian based printer aplha means X, beta means Y and gamma means Z.
End stop value is just a pin name (mine placed right on the board), ‘^’ suffix enables pull-up and ‘!’ suffix inverts signal.
End stops configuration can be checked by issuing ‘M119’ g-code in printer’s terminal. You need to achieve all endstops to be reported as ‘0’ when they are not triggered and  ‘1’ when they are all triggered, ie:

X_min:1 Y_max:1 Z_min:0 pins- (X)P1.29:1 (Y)P1.26:1 (Z)P1.25:0 Probe: 0

Here you can see that X and Y end stops was triggered in opposition with  Z which was open.
You need to specify your homing direction in direction where your end stops are placed. I specified to home Y axis to max, because I had end stop at max position in contrast to other axis.
alpha/beta/gamma_min/max – options used to specify physical dimensions of axes. My printer has square rectangular table specified by two points (1,1; 220,220), but head can move besides that coordinates.
When head homed by XY it home outside of table space:

So when I set negative values or values larger than actual table, I just shifted origin, to make it placed on a corner of print table.
Soft limits just set boundaries for G<X> movement codes, they prevents movements which may damage  printer.

I don’t want to make a saga from that post, so I will  continue in the next posts.

Lenovo battery hack and whitelist at the same time

Recently I’ve got x230 laptop and have a plan to change buggy Intel Centrino 6205 adapter to something like Atheros, also I decided that it’s worth to have ability to use x220 like batteries, just in case.
To achieve that, I needed to flash patched firmware for EC controller (thinkpad-ec project) and modified bios (1vyrain project), but it was confusing, what should go first? Firstly I didn’t realised that thinkpad-ec flashes only EC firmware, it looked like EC mod will update bios to newer version than supported by 1vyrain, same time 1vyrain would update bios to version newer than supported by thinpkad-ec.
Finally, here is how to have EC mod together with patched BIOS on x230 laptop:
1. BIOS should be old enough to be compatible with  1vyrain and thinpkad-ec, at 2020-03-22 it should be not newer than 2.60 (1vyrain has requirements of more older bios than thinkpad-ec, requirements for 1vyrain patch can be found here)  otherwise it should be downgraded as described here.
2. Make bootable device with thinkpad-ec image, in BIOS set boot mode to ‘Legacy’ and update EC firmware.
3. Make bootable device with 1vyrain image, in BIOS set boot mode “UEFI only”, disable “Secure boot” and update BIOS.

In my case I ended with BIOS version 2.77 EC version 1.14.

STM32Cube FW_F1 V1.8.0 package breaks HAL time source init

As a hobby I’m working on a growbox controller which based on stm32 MCU. Yesterday I got STM32Cube MCU package update, as many times before I just upgraded package and project to latest version, as result firmware started to stuck in assert_failed().

It happens during call of SystemClock_Config() (defined in main.c) which in turn calls  HAL_RCC_ClockConfig(), which in turn calls HAL_InitTick(uwTickPrio) at Drivers/STM32F1xx_HAL_Driver/Src/stm32f1xx_hal_rcc.c:947:

...
  /* Update the SystemCoreClock global variable */
  SystemCoreClock = HAL_RCC_GetSysClockFreq() &gt;&gt; AHBPrescTable[(RCC-&gt;CFGR &amp; RCC_CFGR_HPRE) &gt;&gt; RCC_CFGR_HPRE_Pos];
 
  /* Configure the source of time base considering new system clocks settings*/
  HAL_InitTick(uwTickPrio);
 
  return HAL_OK;
}

When it happens uwTickPrio still have invalid interrupt priority, which is defined in Drivers/STM32F1xx_HAL_Driver/Src/stm32f1xx_hal.c:80:

...
/** @defgroup HAL_Private_Variables HAL Private Variables
  * @{
  */
__IO uint32_t uwTick;
uint32_t uwTickPrio   = (1UL &lt;&lt; __NVIC_PRIO_BITS); /* Invalid PRIO */
HAL_TickFreqTypeDef uwTickFreq = HAL_TICK_FREQ_DEFAULT;  /* 1KHz */
...

Only one place where uwTickPrio can be updated is ./Drivers/STM32F1xx_HAL_Driver/Src/stm32f1xx_hal.c:234:

__weak HAL_StatusTypeDef HAL_InitTick(uint32_t TickPriority)
{
  /* Configure the SysTick to have interrupt in 1ms time basis*/
  if (HAL_SYSTICK_Config(SystemCoreClock / (1000U / uwTickFreq)) &gt; 0U)
  {
    return HAL_ERROR;
  }
 
  /* Configure the SysTick IRQ priority */
  if (TickPriority &lt; (1UL &lt;&lt; __NVIC_PRIO_BITS))
  {
    HAL_NVIC_SetPriority(SysTick_IRQn, TickPriority, 0U);
    uwTickPrio = TickPriority;
  }
  else
  {
    return HAL_ERROR;
  }
 
  /* Return function status */
  return HAL_OK;
}

But this function is redefined in ./Core/Src/stm32f1xx_hal_timebase_tim.c:42:

HAL_StatusTypeDef HAL_InitTick(uint32_t TickPriority)
{
  RCC_ClkInitTypeDef    clkconfig;
  uint32_t              uwTimclock = 0;
  uint32_t              uwPrescalerValue = 0;
  uint32_t              pFLatency;
 
  /*Configure the TIM4 IRQ priority */
  HAL_NVIC_SetPriority(TIM4_IRQn, TickPriority ,0);
 
...

And doesn’t contain proper uwTickPrio initialization, as result it’s called with invalid TickPriority  and fails into assert_failed() during HAL_NVIC_SetPriority(TIM4_IRQn, TickPriority ,0) call.