Hello there guys!!
Recently I started wondering if a flash upgrade is possible on WL-500gP v1. Looking inside I noticed U12 place for a SPI flash - measuring connections it looks like the pinout is correct for example for S25FL128P (8 pin version) which is 16mB flash chip. SO , SI and SCK lines indicate some resistance comparing to GROUND - obviously some connections have been made on PCB and I'm sure they are connected to the SoC. CS# i bound with the CE# pin of the original flash chip. HOLD and WP would need a pull-up(pull-down) resistors (PCB has place for them). VCC and GND are on their places also. So from the hardware side there is a possibility to upgrade to larger ammounts of flash without the need for using SD storage or USB sticks (obviously removing old flash chip or desoldering its CE leg).
The problem is I'm pretty nooby in linux, CFE experiments and simillar stuff. My question is: if I copy the contents of the original flash chip, programm it to the SPI chip as they are, is there any possibility that the router will start the bootoader ?? Or maybe some of You know how to setup the bootloader for using SPI flash instead the parallel one. Does BCM4704 even try to boot up from SPI if it doesn't find any data on the original parallel interface. ASUS engineers didn't put U12 footprint on the board without a reason. I hope hearing your opinions on this.
PS. Sorry for my English if I made some mistakes - grettings from Poland
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