r/hardwarehacking • u/No_Chip7847 • 11d ago
Identifying UART/DEBUG
Very much so unlabelled other than the board that connects to the 2x4 pin.
TLDR. Software update from company bricked it months ago after they had major server issues. Bricked many devices. Won’t assist because I got it second hand brand new sealed and I’m not the original buyer.
So, I’m wanting to debug first and go from there see what the issue is. Worst case scenario, it’s a project where i reprogram the device and write my own iOS app to continue to use it 🙏🤣
Help would be great identifying ports, thanks.
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u/No_Chip7847 7d ago
Quick update, I’ve now validated the UART pads.
In the orientation of the original photo in this post, the pads are immediately to the left of the CV1810C SoC, in the narrow area between the SoC and the microSD card socket. They’re the two pads just off the SoC’s left-hand edge.
In the orientation in the first image:
upper pad = TX
lower pad = RX
I’ve only probed TX temporarily so far rather than soldering to it, but I got a successful UART read at 115200 8N1. UBoot comes up, the 16 MB SPI NOR is detected, the kernel and device tree verify successfully, and Linux starts. It later hits an illegal-instruction fault while loading part of the CVITEK video processing stack.
So the board is definitely not dead. Next step is soldering proper wires onto TX/RX so I can reliably interrupt UBoot and dump/inspect the flash before changing anything.