After waiting for a new gimbal controller, which has apparently been lost in the post, I finally ran out of patients and borrowed one of these from my good friend Dave:

Again it's a Chinese board but if it gets me in the air it will have to do.

It came with Martinez firmware on it but I knew from previous experience that it would accept the Alexmos v2.2 firmware and so I began to flash this via USB.

You'll notice from the image above that instead of an FTDI chip the USB to Serial on this board is taken care of by a SiLabs CP2102 chip. So I connected it to my Windows 7 x64 machine and installed the drivers.

All went well and I started to flash the .hex file using XLoader. This is when the trouble began!

The process failed and so did the next try and the next. So I thought I would burn the Arduino bootloader onto the 328p and try to install the Martinez firmware (which comes in the form of an Arduino sketch). It was then I received the dreaded "AvrDude Not in Sync" error.

I decided then that the best thing to do would be to solder an ISCP header onto the board and break out my trusty USBTinyISP programmer to get the job done right:

Of course anyone who has tried to use one of these on a 64-bit windows machine will tell you, it isn't just that simple!!

After finding the correct drivers and disabling digital signing in Windows, I finally got it installed and connected, but would it work?? would it %&*£!!

It was at this point that I realised how foolish I had been. I spun my chair around to face my Linux machine (which I swear had been laughing at me the whole time) and plugged the USBTiny in. 30 Seconds Later I had a fully functional BCG 2.0 board running the Alexmos firmware!

I kissed my Linux machine, cursed Microsoft at the top of my voice and proceeded to tune my gimbal :)