Hi Poly fans,
Over the last two years I've sold about 40 HAWK-800 kits. Generally, each customer has carefully constructed both the kit itself and also carefully modified the main board. I've had only one complete failure where the enthusiast was too impatient and used a horrible soldering iron to destroy the HAWK printed circuit board. Other than that, a slightly more common problem has been failure to send the software to the HAWK using the three system exclusive files and MIDI-OX.
So I bought a couple of cheap MIDI to USB cables. These are the type that you can buy on ebay for about 5 bucks each and they're the type that don't require any additional software because they are supposed to work with the standard Windows drivers.
Well, what I found in my testing was that the interface works perfectly with LINUX but fails miserably with Windows XP which would seem to suggest that the problem is with the windows driver and not the actual hardware itself.
Anyway, it's something to look out for when picking up cheap MIDI interfaces.
But also, I've now updated the boot code to include much better error messages in the flashing process. This includes a data validity check (checksum) being done to ensure that the flash ROM has an exact copy of the downloaded firmware.
Mike.