Unbricking A Router With A Raspi

About a decade ago, [Mansour] learned of the Linksys WRT54G, a wireless router that’s been shoved into just about every project under the sun. After learning of this device’s power, he decided a firmware upgrade was in order. Unfortunately, he accidentally bricked this router and left it sitting on a shelf for a few years.

Idle devices are the devil’s playthings, and when [Mansour] discovered a Samsung hard drive with a an SDRAM that was compatible with the WRT54G, he decided he would have a go at repairing this ancient router. There was only one problem: the most popular utility for programming the router through the JTAG header required a PC parallel port.

No problem, then, as [Mansour] had a Raspberry Pi on hand. The parallel port utility bit-banged the new firmware over to the router, something the GPIO port on the Pi could do in spades. By adding Pi support to the debricking utility, [Mansour] had a functional WRT54G with just a little bit of patience and a few wires connecting the GPIO and JTAG header.

18 thoughts on “Unbricking A Router With A Raspi

      1. If you opt to just order some RAM, a good candidate is ISSI IS42S16160D-7TLI, you can get it from Arrow for $3.59 a piece, and they have craploads in stock. 16 bit wide, 143MHz speed grade, 32MB, good stuff. I upgraded the abysmal WRT54GS2 to 32MB of RAM and 8MB of flash (up from 8MB RAM/2MB flash).

    1. Unless you have replaced your SDRAM or otherwise slammed a hammer on it, it’s often unlikely that the issue is a hardware one. My router was fine before the surgery (unlike what’s in the description here). I just wanted to upgrade the RAM for better performance.

Leave a Reply to oxplotCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.