Hi Anthony,
Not to be curt… but, it’s kinda more of an issue with your system than an issue everyone else experiences. We wouldn’t have a business if you were the norm.
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Regarding a solid red light… that’s not what a bricked camera does. It will flash the LED white and all colors rapidly. A solid red light means something else. Generally this means the OS is scanning the disk and reading out all the files.
Anyway, I wouldn’t buy a new device. The cameras are generally very hard to break at all. We did once release a firmware upgrade for a while that overclocked the H7 from 400 MHz to 480 MHz which some STM32H7 chips were not able to handle. But, this has since been fixed.
The only way you can break a camera is to break the USB cable connection on the PCB.
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If the camera is flashing blue then it’s working fine. If you are 100% sure the USB cable you have is a USB power + data cable then it should appear on the PC. Do you have any applications that would block it being enumerated? It would appear as a tty ACM or tty USB device. Also, the internal flash drive should pop open. If you see a red light appear at any time on the camera then that means the OS is scanning the device file system. Generally, until that scan complete the tty USB port will not appear.
There is the possibility that the disk on the camera is corrupted. That could cause some issues. In this case, can you insert an SD card into the camera while powered off before plugging it into the PC and see if the camera works fine after being connected to the PC again?
