DFU Driver

The good news is that the DFU driver is automatically found by Windows update. When you first plug in the radio, your device manager will say it's a Digital Radio in USB mode

And Windows update will search for the driver

Once complete, the radio will come up as an STM DFU device

Download MD380 Tools

You'll need a bunch of tools and utilities to compile and upload the MD380 hacked firmware. For mac and linux, you probably have this already. You can visit our Windows tools tutorial for information on how to install git and other command line tools

Once you have things like git and cygwin installed, download the latest md380-tools codebase from Github

I used git within cygwin to

git clone https://github.com/travisgoodspeed/md380tools.git

and then cd into the new directory and make sure the list of files is similar to the above

Downloading & Patching

You can run the tool for downloading and patching the firmware by running

make clean dist

(which will clean up the current setup and run the distribution procedure)

When you run it you should get something like this:

If you are running cygwin and get an md5sum error like this

Then you can edit the Makefile in firmwares and add dos2unix D002.032.bin.md5 and dos2unix D002.032.zip.md5 before the md5sum commands to clean up the dos line endings.

Uploading the Firmware

OK now you're ready to upload the firmware. Check for a newly created folder md380tools-yyyy-mm-dd with the current date

Inside you'll find your freshly patched firmware

And inside the windows directory you'll even get the upgrade.exe tool from Tytera

Run this program - it's in half Mandarin half English but that's OK. Click Open Update File and select that firmware from the upper directory

Put the Radio into DFU Mode

 OK right before you actually download the firmware into your radio you'll need to put it into DFU mode - so that it accepts new firmware (not the same mode as for updating the settings!)

  1. Turn the radio off (using the volume knob)
  2. Connect the USB programming cable to your computer
  3. Peel off the headphone/mic insert & plug in the other side of the cable (it can only go one way)
  4. Hold down the PTT and top button
  5. Turn on the radio while the buttons are held
  6. You will see the LED blink red/green

Then click Download Update File

Give it a few minutes, it will look like it 'hangs' but its working, it is just a little longer than you think it'll take!

On success you'll get this message, which means it worked

You may have to turn off/on the radio to launch the new firmware

This guide was first published on May 24, 2016. It was last updated on May 24, 2016.

This page (Updating MD-380 Firmware) was last updated on May 06, 2016.

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