We recently purchased a ChipWhisperer Husky-Plus board and are facing an issue where the device is not being detected by the host PC over USB. On power-up, the observed LED states are: ADC – red, Glitch – red, Error – red, Armed – green but very dim, Capturing – blue (dim), Status – off. The board does not enumerate as a ChipWhisperer device on the host. Based on the LED pattern and behavior, it appears the SAM3U may be stuck in bootloader mode or the application firmware is not running. I attempted the documented erase/reset procedure using the recessed switch located on the opposite side of the 20-pin connector near the USB port (pressed using a needle, as described in the Husky documentation), but the device is still not detected after reconnecting USB. Multiple USB ports and cables were also tried with the same result. Kindly advise on further recovery steps or confirm if this LED state indicates a known firmware or hardware issue.
The expected state of the LEDs when first connecting is dim, except for the green status LED which should be blinking. However once you put it into bootloader mode, the status LED will not be blinking. So, everything is normal there.
Which version of ChipWhisperer have you installed, how did you install it, and on which OS? HuskyPlus is not supported by any release prior to the latest 6.0 release.
Finally, did you purchase from us (directly from our webstore or from Mouser)? Husky being open source, there are clones.
Thanks for your response. We can confirm that we are using ChipWhisperer 6.0 (latest release) specifically for the Husky-Plus, and the unit was purchased directly from the official ChipWhisperer webstore. We have tested the board on multiple host PCs(Both Ubuntu 24 and Windows 11), USB ports, and known-good cables, but in all cases the device is not detected as a ChipWhisperer device nor as a bootloader/DFU device, it’s coming under com port as USB serial bus, bot not getting detected by cw.scope().
On power-up, the Error LED remains solid red, the Status LED does not blink, and the LED state does not change even after performing the documented erase/reset procedure using the reset switch near the 20 Pin connector. The board appears to remain stuck in the same state regardless of reset attempts.
If the device is indeed in bootloader mode, could you please explain the exact procedure to return it to normal application mode? Additionally, we would appreciate step-by-step recovery instructions from this state.
@jpthibault@chipwhisperer Thanks a lot to the team for the support and clear guidance.
On Linux, the device was correctly enumerating as 03eb:6124 Atmel SAMBA bootloader, confirming it was in bootloader mode. Running cw.program_sam_firmware(hardware_type='cwhuskyplus') successfully reflashed the SAM3 firmware. After a power cycle, the device re-enumerated as the normal Husky-Plus USB device and is now detected correctly by cw.scope().’