[PLUG] I hosed my WRT54GL, need JTAG help

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Thu, Sep 03, 2009 at 11:16:05AM -0700, Tim Wescott wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know if, by chance, the WRT54GL has this, or did they just
> rely on JTAG as their download of last resort?  They don't need to be
> serviced remotely, and Linksys probably doesn't feel like folks
> downloading their own firmware is a big part of their market share, so it
> makes oodles of sense for this not to be the case.

The GL unit is explicitly for this kind of hacking.  More memory,
higher price.  The regular WRT54G unit started out with enough ROM
and RAM to hack, but devolved.  That does not mean the GL has the
appropriate protected firmware and reset pins and such;  few people
are as smart as Tim.  When Wescott Wonderful Wireless starts selling
access points, I will buy one.

Since there are low cost, low power, fully featured programmable units
like the PCEngines Alix out there, which run a normal X86 distro on
fast hardware and have a slot for a PCMCIA wireless card, I've been
less interested in flashing COTS access points, anyway.  Still, I would
love to live in a world where all consumer gear was reprogrammable
( "download Nokilla, and turn your cell phone into a death ray!").

That doesn't help the original questioner, though.  Maybe it sets 
the "just give up and use an Alix instead" threshold.  There is a
non-zero chance that his particular GL unit is unrecoverable.

Keith

(COTS = Commercial Off The Shelf)

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs