Return to stock

Back to official.
No hard feelings.

Vantic makes no permanent changes — ever. There are two ways to put the official IceWhaleTech firmware back on your 7th Bay, and both land you on exactly the firmware the board shipped with.

Easy way

The one-click flasher

~5 minutes · cable · any state, even a broken chip

  1. Open the one-click flasher in Chrome or Edge.
  2. Plug the 7th Bay in over USB-C and press Connect device.
  3. Pick IceWhaleTech stock as the firmware.
  4. Press Restore stock firmware. Erase, write, verify, reset — all automatic.

The stock images are already on the flasher page — nothing to download, no addresses to type. This works even if your chip is currently boot-looping, because the flasher erases first and recovers the link by itself.

Open the flasher
Original way

Manual — Espressif's esptool-js

The process documented on the original Vantic web tool, kept here for completeness. Use it if you prefer doing each step by hand, or if you want to flash firmware from elsewhere.

  1. Get the files. Download the three official binaries — from IceWhaleTech/7th-bay on GitHub or the copies below (same files, hosted here).
  2. Open esptool-js in Chrome or Edge: espressif.github.io/esptool-js. Leave the baud rates alone — 921600 program / 115200 console.
  3. Connect. Click Connect and pick the USB JTAG/serial debug unit. You should see Chip is ESP32-C3 in the console.
  4. Erase the flash. Click Erase Flash and wait 10–15 seconds. Don't skip this — it prevents a whole class of weird bugs.
    Expect the boot-loop. A blank chip reconnects every 1–2 seconds. To calm it: hold BOOT + RST ~2s, release RST first (keep holding BOOT), then release BOOT. When the LED goes dark, hit Disconnect, then Connect again.
  5. Add the three files at their addresses. Click Add File three times and match each .bin to the address in its filename:
    0x01-stock-firmware-0x0.binBootloader · 12.9 KB · download
    0x80002-stock-firmware-0x8000.binPartition table · 3.0 KB · download
    0x100003-stock-firmware-0x10000.binMain firmware · 774 KB · download

    Double-check every row — swapped addresses are the #1 cause of a flash that won't boot.

  6. Program. Leave flash mode/frequency/size on keep, press Program, wait ~1 minute. You should see Hash of data verified and Leaving....
  7. Reset and done. Press RST (don't just yank the cable), unplug, power the ZimaCube, and reconnect to the ZimaCube WiFi. You're back on the official firmware — the update page lives at http://zimacube.local or http://172.16.1.1.

Prefer a full reference? The complete manual with troubleshooting lives in INSTRUCTIONS.txt.

Coming back later? Vantic and stock share the same partition layout, so you can hop between them as often as you like — USB, or over WiFi if the device still boots. Nothing you do here is permanent.