I recently had to repair one of these Amiko devices for a friend and discovered after reading numerous posts at different places that said you need a PC with onboard serial or a usb to serial with an FTDI chip to recover these using the 3.5mm 232 jack port.
After numerous attempts i too received the dreaded Transfer data failed line in the loader , on closer inspection upon opening the device i tested the continuity of the pins with the 3.5mm jack in to the 232 adapter and i noticed that there was no continuity on the first pin of where the jack was supposed to make contact, so it seems the 3.5mm jacks are not long enough on some of them to reach the end of the 232 port.
what is needed to get a connection is to manually solder onto the top of the pins on the board , using this method any usb to 232 serial adapter will work . No need for a PC with onboard serial or a FTDI based usb to serial.
Hope this helps.
Regards
