If you’ve been reading Hackaday for any length of time, you’ll know we love seeing hackers replacing the stock firmware on their devices with open source alternatives. Usually this is done because the open firmware offers more features, or lifts some arbitrary limitation. But if you find yourself installing OSIRIS on an Onkyo AV receiver such as the TX-NR717, it’s probably because you’re trying to bring the thing back to life.

As developer [Jokūbas] explains, certain Onkyo receivers that use the Texas Instruments D830 are known to suffer from a very specific failure — the device will power on and appear functional, but no audio will come through. When this happens, it’s either because the D830 itself has failed or the 64 MiB NAND flash chip that holds the firmware it runs is cooked. Unfortunately, replacing either component is a bit more difficult than you might expect.

If you swap the D830 with a pin-compatible chip that’s easier to find and less prone to failure, the stock firmware won’t boot. If you try to replace the NAND, you’ll find that the original software is only capable of addressing 512-byte pages, while the flash you’ll find on the market today uses 2 KiB or 4 KiB pages. In both cases, it’s OSIRIS to the rescue.

The open firmware not only supports D830 compatible chips such as the OMAP-L137, but it’s able to address modern NAND flash, making the replacement of either or both component far more practical. With fresh hardware and the new firmware installed, your Onkyo receiver should spring back to life. That said, OSIRIS isn’t feature complete yet, and truthfully the items listed as untested or not implemented on the feature list currently outnumber the entries for what actually does work. But at least it’s a start.

Of course, not all the burned out parts on your Onkyo receiver require a firmware flash to replace. Sometimes a misbehaving unit just needs to have a few of its passive components replaced.