NAZE32 REV6 Full Version Flight Controller 32bit Processor with Barometer and Compass

I bought two of these flight controllers for my Unmanned Aerial Systems class that I teach. One of them worked for a short period of time, and the other never worked at all. It would not connect to the bootloader. After doing a bit of research, I found a way to "short" the bootloader, which helped to have clean flight recognize the board. But even with that, it would never connect to any configurator programs. I contacted the seller and received no response. I suppose we're out $50.

I have had a lot of trouble getting this to work. In fact, I returned the first one as defective before ordering a second. It took me a lot of detective work, but I have a workable solution and I'm not sure how repeatable it is. For anyone else struggling, this is what I found...First, it should be noted that this controller is F1 based, and support was dropped by both Cleanflight and BetaFlight in mid-2017. Looking at both configurators, it appears that its still supported. It should be mentioned in the product listing.Second, I was not able to get the newest firmwares (>= 2.2.0) to load. Instead, I started with the 1.14.2 cleanflight. To do this, I had to manually load an old version of the configurator (2.0.3, which is found on the github page) MANUALLY into Chrome. The process for manually loading apps/extensions into chrome is easily found by searching on google.Once I had the 1.14.2 firmware loaded, I was able to use the configurator to load all the way up to the 2.1.0 firmware and upgrade the configurator up to 2.4.0 (current).Fortunately, this is still somewhat current (enough) and it DOES work. Understand that you won't be getting any newer features, which would require an upgrade to an F3, F4, or F7.

I tried older releases of INAV, Cleanflight, BetaFlight and any other configuration tool that is supposed to work for this and this is junk to me. Will not do anything but blink after HOURS and DAYS of trying.If someone finds a solution, please advise. I tried using older configurators as suggested in earlier reviews, but none of that worked for me.JUNK!

Will not flash updated firmware, rebooted and it will not hold the flash