As posted previously, I bricked a Philips Pronto NG touch screen programmable remote. Before these remotes were discontinued, they retailed for more than $400. They are very cool and I like them a lot. I had 2 of them for 2 rooms.
Anyway, I ordered 2 on ebay at a severe discount. I received them today. One of them worked without issue whatsoever.
The other had some issues. After some playing around (and I mean hours and hours of re-firmware updating, refining a setup and download, crashing, repeating until I finally got something to work), I think I’ve come up with a working theory. I think that there is a bad spot in the flash memory and the code inside the Pronto NG is not elegant in dealing with bad blocks and just crashes rather than marking bad and moving on.
Once I took my very large setup and shrunk it down to less than 1/4 of it’s original size (it was 4 rooms worth of programming and now it is just one room and heavily optimized at that), it now loads and works.
I’m not sure why this failure happened because I believe that flash’s failures really occur after lots of burning and I doubt a remote get’s lots of burning (once in a great while when a setup changes which is not very often). Even then, it takes a lot of writes to cause failures unless Philips used really inexpensive flash memory which is possible.
Still it’s my best theory. I’m bummed that I’ve got a limited remote but at least it works and I’ll try to have a conversation with the person I bought it from to see what we can do (he has 100% good ratings and I’m not out to hose him so I’m hopeful).