sham_blog

A few days ago my friend Roberto received his new LiveScribe Pulse. After playing a bit with his new toy he decided to attach it to the computer, but unfortunately the pen got bricked during a firmware upgrade.

So with my friend Filippo we tried to perform various kinds of hard reset, following what's described in 29101 - Mac Master Reset and firmware update utility, but with no success.

We were about to give up when, just out of curiosity, I decided to attach the pen to my Linux machine. Using "lsusb -vv" I've discovered that the pen was stuck in its Device Firmware Upgrade mode waiting for something interesting to happen.

Fantastic! We found the pen firmware inside LiveScribe Flash Utility and we uploaded it using "dfutool" from BlueZ... The pen came back to life, very good!

After this forced upgrade the pen was basically working, but it lacked some functionalities like voice recording. But now official LiveScribe utilities were able to see the pen, so we re-flashed using them and we obtained a 100% working device.

These are the steps we used to flash the LiveScribe Pulse from Linux:

$ wget http://www.livescribe.com/downloads/support/LivescribeSmartpenFlashUtility_2.1.1_Mac.zip
$ unzip LivescribeSmartpenFlashUtility_2.1.1_Mac.zip
$ cd 2.1.1\ Pen\ Flash\ Utility.app/Contents/Resources/Bundles/
$ unzip SystemSoftwareV2.1.1_C.bnd -d SystemSoftwareV2.1.1_C
$ cd SystemSoftwareV2.1.1_C/Files/
$ dfutool upgrade bali_ams3.dfu
Filename  bali_ams3.dfu
Filesize  3365572
Checksum  40559ec9 (valid)

Available devices with DFU support:

  1) Bus 004 Device 002: ID 1cfb:1020 Interface 2