{"id":372,"date":"2010-03-13T20:38:57","date_gmt":"2010-03-13T12:38:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/?p=372"},"modified":"2010-03-13T20:38:57","modified_gmt":"2010-03-13T12:38:57","slug":"fixing-a-tl-wr941n-journeys-in-shopping-on-taobao","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/2010\/03\/fixing-a-tl-wr941n-journeys-in-shopping-on-taobao\/","title":{"rendered":"Fixing a TL-WR941N (journeys in shopping on Taobao)"},"content":{"rendered":"

As its been a while since I did any hardware stuff (other than some dabbling in Arduino), I decided I would try and resuscitate a bricked 941n router. I had given it to the staff to fiddle with, but they needed a push in the right direction for where to start.<\/p>\n

First I needed tools.
\nLuckily China is pretty awesome when it comes to getting electronic bits and pieces so most of what I needed was a mere Taobao away.<\/p>\n

As the crap soldering irons in the office weren’t going to hack it, my first purchase was a decent soldering iron.
\nI took a look at the Wellers (which I used in a previous lifetime), and decided that the pricing was a little too steep for my liking!
\nTaobao had plenty of cough, cough ‘clone’ Hako 936’s though, so I bought one of those, 10 tips and some solder for a little less than 200RMB delivered to the office.<\/p>\n

I could have gone to buy it over in the electronics mall over in Beijing lu, but seriously, Taobao is easier.<\/p>\n

While I was at it, I also orderd a Rek DC power supply, and some JTAG cables.
\nThe PSU isn’t totally useful for router hacking, but we do have a lot of people that forget to bring laptop chargers with them, so it will come in handy for that. Looks pretty nifty too.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Hako 936 and Rek DC PSU<\/p><\/div>\n

Next up was a serial to ttl adaptor, as the TP-Link uses TTL voltage apparently, and I needed to convert into standard pc serial.
\nI bought 2 adaptors, one USB one, with rather crappily made headers, and a rather nicer serial one with pin’s.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As I’m rather crap at soldering, I totally expected things to bork something up, but amazingly I got the headers installed relatively easily, and even managed to bridge pad (R356) to enable serial first go (as per the wiki).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I plugged in my serial adaptor to the computer, and powered up the router.
\nSuprisingly everything worked first time around, and I got some serial output in HyperTerminal.<\/p>\n

A few nanoseconds later I got to experience again how much I hated HyperTerminal.
\nGrumble cpu usage grumble frozen input grumble mutter,… and installed PuttyTel instead.<\/p>\n

Putty also seems to autodetect the kernel speed nicely (as boot changes from 9600 to 115,200baud), which is a bonus.<\/p>\n

I still need to time it right so I can catch the u-boot in time to stop it, and, I also still need to reflash it, but the hard part is done!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Total cost – roughly 250RMB for parts (soldering iron, tips, serial ttl adaptor, pin headers, jtag stuff etc), plus about an hour of time, most of which emcompassed clearing my desk enough so I could solder \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

I’m all setup for more journeys into equipment though, and I can now completely recover borked equipment handily.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Useful pages:
\nhttp:\/\/wiki.openwrt.org\/inbox\/tp-link.tl-wr941nd<\/a> (Pinouts)
\nhttps:\/\/forum.openwrt.org\/viewtopic.php?id=18354&p=1 <\/a>(Thread on TL-WR941 hacking)<\/p>\n

Firmware files:
\nhttp:\/\/downloads.openwrt.org\/snapshots\/trunk\/ar71xx\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Taobao shopping:
\nhttp:\/\/item.taobao.com\/auction\/item_detail-db1-3fbe7be878a7aa35dd4ec1e4260113e8.jhtml<\/a> (RS232 TTL)
\nhttp:\/\/item.taobao.com\/auction\/item_detail-db2-3c9886e66da40119a6c72fe03c4b8d38.jhtml<\/a> (Hakko 936 + tips)
\nhttp:\/\/item.taobao.com\/auction\/item_detail-0db1-4fbc4e80f96ae37dbd34b9cb466aa642.jhtml?cm_cat=0<\/a> (Wiggler JTAG)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As its been a while since I did any hardware stuff (other than some dabbling in Arduino), I decided I would try and resuscitate a bricked 941n router. I had given it to the staff to fiddle with, but they needed a push in the right direction for where to start. First I needed tools. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[199,204,201,206,83,205,202,203,198,200],"class_list":["post-372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technical-mumbo-jumbo","tag-jtag","tag-openwrt","tag-serial","tag-soldering","tag-taobao","tag-tplink","tag-ttl","tag-uboot","tag-wiggler","tag-wr941n"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":384,"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372\/revisions\/384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.computersolutions.cn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}