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u/thrilleratplay 4d ago
As someone who has flashed coreboot on a number of different devices, this is somehow both impressive and horrifying. Kudos.
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u/Decent-Cow2080 4d ago
you know you can just desolder the chip and solder it on directly to the ch341a? it's a 5 minute job rather than a 5 hour one
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u/ehm-i 4d ago
idk how to do micro soldering.
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u/Decent-Cow2080 4d ago
you just did something 20 times harder lmao. put s huge blob of solder on one side, heat it up so all 4 legs are covered in melted solder and with tweezers slightly pull it up till one side detaches, then do the same thing on the other side. and it's off. no hot air
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u/ehm-i 4d ago
i did that once on my router, that process i pulled one pad and i had to give it to a professional to resolder it back
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u/309_Electronics 3d ago
What temperature and where you patient enough? Also you should use flux and or leaded solder to make life easier.
Otherwise you could use a soic8 clip or pogo pins which dont require soldering. Also kind of surprised it works as often when i want to read a flash chip, i end up backfeeding power into the board which meeses with my read
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u/Quivex 3d ago
You can also buy one of those 8 pin clip on cables, I thought most Ch341A listings included them. They can be a but finicky to get good contact but way easier than this lol. Also faster than soldering/desoldering if you have to flash and test multiple times.
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u/Decent-Cow2080 3d ago
i never had luck with those clips, they seemingly contacted and read the chip well, but writing didn't seem to work, always sending data with always different checksums
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u/thrilleratplay 4d ago
Wait....is this a Chromebook? Why are you externally flashing instead of using MrChromebox's scripts?
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u/LeatherMine 3d ago
A couple decades ago, people got really good at this after a satellite tv provider bricked our hacked receivers.
No fancy clips back then unless you wanted to pay $100+. Also had to carefully lift the leg of the power pin off the pcb while hot because powering up the whole circuit would interfere. And either way, had to lift another leg to install your write protection switch.
Fun times!
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u/ciocolata69 3d ago
I am trying to fix an old college laptop of mine, first I ever had. An asus K53E, can't find a complete dump without a paywall, how did you find yours?
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u/Longjumping-Equal895 3d ago
I have one of those bios flashers and a laptop I’m trying to fix can I DM you for some guidance oh sletchy wiring guru
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u/fullmetaljackass 3d ago
If you're serious about fixing it, don't waste your time on janky shit like this. Just buy a test clip.
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u/Longjumping-Equal895 3d ago
Oh I have one of those I bought this
https://amzn.eu/d/01k9vzA1Just some guidance and stuff would be nice that’s all I mean if I didn’t have that clip I would go janky solder route though I’m no stranger to jank solutions
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u/tyami94 2d ago edited 2d ago
super easy -- once you are at this stage you really can't fuck it up.
a few pointers:
- that CH341A adapter you purchased has a defect. it applies too high of a voltage to the data pins and this could fry your flash chip. i fixed mine by cutting a trace and putting a jumper on the board. can't remember exactly what i did or i'd tell you more. ended up moving to a pi pico (with this: https://github.com/opensensor/pico-serprog/) later as it's just a better flasher.
- the clips that come with those SUCK. if you think you'll ever do this again, go get a blue pomona clip. they're nowhere near as shitty. expensive but worth every penny.
- ALWAYS triple-check that you put the clip on the right direction EVERY TIME. SPI flash chips almost always put the VCC and GND lines in opposing corners, so if you put the clip on backwards you'll reverse polarity the chip and probably break it.
- ALWAYS backup the existing flash before you make *any* writes. back it up 3 times and compare them with a hashing algorithm. there is no error correction, so keep dumping it until you have 3 matching dumps in a row. discard all but one of the 3 good ones. you *will* need this, especially on intel systems. the IFD contains all sorts of info that you *will* need that you *can't* get back if you erase it, like the MAC address of the NIC, etc.
- after flashing the chip always re-read it to verify that it wrote correctly. once again there is no error-correction here so subtle errors will slip by if you dont do this.
- don't use windows to work with flash chips. use flashprog on linux. it has sane defaults and supports a shitload of chips and programmers. also plenty of tunables to workaround weird issues. linux also just has a bunch nice built-in tools like dd that make working with raw binary files easier, especially when trying to prep a bios update package to be written directly to a flash chip.
- check out the tools included with libreboot. it has a bunch of helpful scripts for working with bios images and editing the IFD, etc.
let me know if you need help flashing a specific bios on a laptop. the bios updates provided by the mfg basically never work when written straight to a flash chip because the spi flash contains *way* more than just the executable bios code nowadays. you typically have to dump the old flash, and extract all of it's sections, then repack it with the new bios image from the updater.
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u/Professional_Move870 3d ago
48 hours of work ... but 30$ laptop @_@ ... worth learning process tho
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u/ElectronicSignifican 1d ago
This is sexy for some reason? 10/10 chaotic but if it works then can’t argue with that
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u/BlueSkies_DarkDemise 3d ago
Am I the only one to notice literally none of the wires actually DO anything? Also it has no heat sync so it wouldn’t work even if it did work?
Nice piece of art though, you should embed it in epoxy and call it a table or something. 😉
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u/Rik_Koningen 3d ago
The second pic shows he's clipping more wires to the loose wires of the first pic to a bios flasher. You flash with the power off so no heat sink needed. This is not they way I'd do this but there's a good chance for this setup to work. Some boards get issues with the board eating your signal so you need to desolder the chip but otherwise this is fine if you're not shorting the legs of the chip.
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u/AeitZean 3d ago
Why wrap the wires round the screws? Just to keep them out the way while you solder?
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u/ehm-i 3d ago
they are hooks
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u/AeitZean 3d ago
I still don't understand, what are hooks? Why are the wires anchored, not directed connected or in wago connectors or something?
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u/IchedDyy 4d ago
No context???