As this process was not that straightforward, even after reading instructions found on this forum, and because I found I had the execution of the exact steps to be critical, I thought to share it with others.
Perhaps this could also lead to feedback from others, to see whether the behaviour I'm experiencing is normal.
These are the steps needed to connect the remote with 9xtreme board installed to a PC using a USB cable. The PC has eepskye installed, which can be downloaded from http://www.er9x.com/ (I am executing these steps on ubuntu linux but it's possible this does not matter):
* make sure batteries are connected to the remote * make sure that NO usb cable is inserted in the remote at this time * power on the remote in bootloader mode by holding both horizontal trim buttons inwards and turning on the power the backlight should come on but you should not see any text on it In some other senarios I saw the text 9Xtreme on the screen, but in this case it never worked * plug in usb cable in pc * plug in usb cable in remote * turn remote power button off, the backlight should continue to light * now pc will detect external usb drive * now you can use eepskyeFailure to execute these exact steps resulted in eepskye not detecting the remote and no USB storage device popping up on the PC.
In linux, the command lsusb shows the following usb id:
ID 0483:df11 SGS Thomson Microelectronics STM Device in DFU Mode
this does not seem to change when the remote is in removable storage mode, or in another mode where eepskye will not detect it (pluggin in the remote while it's on always makes the computer detect it, regardless of whether the external usb storage feature and eepskye detecting it works).
Now that eepskye detects my remote I can update the firmware.
I compiled the latest development version myself, as I described in another thread: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=8203
The .bin file that resulted from this compilation process can be flashed to the remote using eepskye.
After flashing, disconnect the USB cable, wait for the remote to power down. Then power it back on regularly.
Go into the "Radio Setup" menu, and select the "Version" option to verify whether the firmware was updated. The date and version number, as well as the username of the person that compiled it should give a hint whether the firmware was successfully updated.