Description
What it is
A short lead with a plug on each end. One goes to your PC. The other, marked OUT, pushes onto the six pins on the board — the little row of holes that is on every System 2 board we make.
It talks to that one board and nothing else. No WiFi, no network, no other boards, no layout wiring. Just the lead and the board.
Why it makes life easier
Most of the time you will never need it. Your boards update themselves over your own WiFi and that is that. This is the one to have in the drawer for the day something gets in the way — the power goes off half way through an update, or somebody pulls a plug at the wrong moment, or you simply want to step back to the version you had last week.
The lead does not care what is on the board or whether it can get online. It writes the software straight onto the chip, from the very first byte, so it works when nothing else can reach the board at all. Plug it in, pick the version, press the button. MegaConsole does the rest and tells you in plain words what it is doing while it does it.
It is careful with you, too. It reads the board before it writes anything and stops if it is not the board you said. It keeps your settings while it works. And if it gets interrupted as well, nothing is broken — you just run it again.
What you can only do with the lead plugged in
- Put new software on one board through the lead
- Put an older version back on one board
- Finish an update that was stopped half way through
- Keep all your settings while it does it
- Read the board first and stop if it is the wrong one
- Show you what a board is saying while it runs, and save that to send to us
- Start a board up again from your PC
- Wipe a board’s settings and start fresh
- Work on one board on its own, with nothing else plugged in
Every version we have ever published is there to choose from, each with the notes that came with it, and MegaConsole checks that every file really came from us before it goes anywhere near your board.
What you need
- A Windows 10 or Windows 11 PC
- MegaConsole, our free program — the lead does nothing on its own
- A USB-C cable, the same sort that charges a phone or a tablet. Any one you already have will do
MegaConsole finds the lead by itself. There is no port to pick and no driver disc.
This or the CAN Adaptor?
They do different jobs. This lead works on one board, close up, and is the one that can put software on by hand and finish an interrupted update. The System2 CAN Adaptor is the everyday one: it shows you the whole layout at once and lets you change and update all of it from your chair. You do not need both, and you can add the other whenever you like.
There is a full side-by-side list of what each one switches on on the MegaConsole page.
