Need help with X20s Firware-radio does not connect to Ethos suite ( might be to old firmware)

[degaldh]

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some guidance. My X20S is currently on firmware v1.1.1, and I am trying to update it to use ETHOS Suite 1.7.0. Unfortunately, the radio won't connect to my Mac/PC via USB.

I’ve read that this is likely because my firmware and bootloader are too old to be recognized by the Suite. I need to perform a manual update to bridge the gap, but I’m not sure which files to download from the GitHub assets or exactly which folders they need to go into on the radio's SD card.

Could someone please walk me through:

Which specific assets I need to download for the X20S?

The correct sequence to flash them so I can finally get ETHOS Suite to recognize my radio?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[strgaltdel]

Hi,

The basic bootloader-update procedure without suite is described in the manual.
Most important of all: make a full backup of the current state.

Rough procedure for a manual bootloader update:

• Download the required files (from GitHub) to your computer
• Put the radio into bootloader mode
• Connect it via USB so that the drives become visible
• Copy the files into the firmware folder
• Disconnect the USB connection
• Start Ethos
• Flash the firmware from within Ethos

BUT
Version 1.1 is extremely outdated — five major releases have been skipped!
A direct migration of your models to the current version is therefore not possible.
It’s basically like trying to upgrade from Windows 95 to Windows 11 expecting all programs to run.

If you have many complex models, you could try updating to each major release step by step (always using the last stable version of each release).
That way, the models would be converted at each step — but you would have to open each model individually every time to trigger converting.
Even then, you’d need to be extremely careful to ensure that everything still works correctly in the end.

Alternatively, you can choose to discard the existing data:

Update only the bootloader
Then use the Suite to restore everything to a clean factory state with Ethos 1.63
However, in that case all existing data will be lost.

For further questions and discussion, I recommend the RCGroups X20 thread.
The GitHub area here is mostly intended for reporting software bugs or feature requests., using rcg you 'll reach more users for assistance

Best regards