CK 3756 kynar wire stripper - buy one!

I wish I'd bought one of these sooner! Expensive, but it just works:

Mini 3G 150M A5-V11 Router (internals/UART)

This is a generic/unbranded router from dealextreme (product 217078)

There's very little information in the product description, but for my 7 quid I ended up with a board known as "A5-V11", which has a RT5350, 4M SPI flash, 32M RAM. It is supported by openwrt (here) but the current bleeding edge with the defaults set is too big. It fits if you drop the IPv6 related packages.

It's already well documented so there isn't any need for much more here. Worth noting is that a standard SOIC clip (i.e. Pomona-style) won't quite make contact due to the position of the big capacitor in the middle. The micro USB port is only used for power... so for future experiments I wired the UART to it following the same pinout as Mediatek stuff. A resistor is required on RX or it won't boot (value not critical, also works fine with 330 ohm).

Maybe needs a couple of blobs of hot glue

The jffs2 thing is a known bug

HP Printer JTAG

Harvesting parts from a HP Officejet 6310 the other day I saw this:

Of course I couldn't leave something like that without at least attempting to find out what they were for! Luckily I hadn't yet destroyed any important bits so it went back together...

And typically, they didn't seem to do anything at all. Maybe because it had no cartridges? Well I certainly wasn't going to buy any, so I thought I'd take a ROM image and if I got bored enough some day I could have a poke around it. But then - I found a connector header covered over with soldermask. As a 2x19 with central ground pins I took a lucky guess at "Mictor 38" layout and got a JTAG connection.

---------------------------------------------------
VTarget = 2.691V
Info: TotalIRLen = 4, IRPrint = 0x01
Info: CP15.0.0: 0x41059461: ARM, Architecure 5TE
Info: CP15.0.1: 0x0F0D20D2: ICache: 4kB (4*32*32), DCache: 4kB (4*32*32)
Info: Cache type: Separate, Write-back, Format B
Found 1 JTAG device, Total IRLen = 4:
 #0 Id: 0x1594602B, IRLen: 04, IRPrint: 0x1, ARM946E-S Core
Found ARM with core Id 0x1594602B (ARM9)
  ETM V1.3: 4 pairs addr.comp, 2 data comp, 8 MM decs, 2 counters, sequencer
Target interface speed: 100 kHz
---------------------------------------------------

...and that's where my knowledge of JTAG debugging ends at the moment. The CPU is some kind of custom HP "top secret" NXP part that doesn't exist, which makes things a bit trickier. This probably isn't the best way to learn about JTAG either. Nevertheless, I'll just keep prodding it until something pops!


<-- "Door open"?! that's the least of your problems haha