I mean developer mode.
How can i perform this step on GJ2CQ?
"After about 3 seconds, the LED should pulse orange and amber. Now press SW7"
Sorry for taking so long to respond but if you look on the board you'll see a silk screened label for where SW7 would go. There 4 solder pads next to it that you can either add a button to the middle 2 pads or just bridge them the a flat head screwdriver.
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Thanks @C_S827 for the reply. I will give it a try.
I have one of these devices and soldered to the pads as described to obtain a USB port.
However, when it comes to booting OpenWrt, I am out of luck.
I removed WP screw. Holding reset while powering on until blinking amber, then release reset & bridging SW7 (blink purple then reboot).
This gets into developer mode (blue, then blinking purple) but the USB drive does not show that it is connected. Additionally, bridging SW7 just flashes purple again, I believe indicating it cannot find an attached USB drive.
I have checked and the wiring to the debug pads is correct. I have 5V on the USB port, and D+/D- are connected as indicated (I have also tried reversing them, to no effect).
The device also does not work with the official recovery image on the USB created using the OnHub tool (Chromebook). So it seems it doesn't detect the USB at all. I've tried different USB sticks, same result: no light indicating connection.
@C_S827 any ideas?
Edit: never mind, it was a layer 1 issue. The USB header -> USB A port adapter I was using doesn't work anymore. The OpenWrt factory image doesn't work, but that's unrelated to this.
Using the pads of the debug header, I was able to successfully flash this device.
The previous Wiki instructions for installing OpenWrt are not very good, and didn't work for me.
The steps that worked for me were:
- write the factory image (
chromeos_9334.41.3_gale_recovery_stable-channel_mp.bin) using the OnHub utility (on a Chromebook) - Restore the router via the soldered USB port, and the SW7 instructions from @C_S827
- Flash galeforce and wait for the pulsing purple LED (although SSH did not work after this; you may be able to omit this step)
- Write OpenWrt initramfs image to USB using the OnHub utility and follow the Wiki instructions to boot and install
I have updated the Google Wifi wiki page to link to this thread for other GJ2CQ device owners.
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@hmartin, thanks for the info.
- Can you confirm that you only connected 4 usb pins to the debug pins and used dc barrel input for powering the device?
- In the current instructions for
Factory Reset, it does not mention using SW7 button. Can you confirm if you needed to use SW7 to boot the stock image or only for booting galeforce/openWRT images?
- Yes, only the 4 wires for USB and the DC barrel for power.
- SW7 pads need to be used to enter developer mode, as described in the installation instructions. Once OpenWrt is installed, no physical interaction is required. The boot process is slightly longer than stock FW as the bootloader waits for a timeout before booting into developer mode (OpenWrt).
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@hmartin, I soldered 4 pins and attempted flashing the firmware with no success.
I tried various combinations of stock firmware and galeforce but none of them seem to start network on LAN port. I tried various flash drives and tried several ones which have LED activity indicator. Based on LED activity indicators, Google Wifi seems to ignore them completely.
Do you have any other suggestions that could allow me to make some progress?
@C_S827, I saw that you wrote:
The only other issue that i had come up along the was was just from trying to skip the initial flashing the OEM firmware before putting in the OpenWRT firmware but after that i got it done with in about an hour
Can you explain what you meant there? How were you able to skip this step?
This is an obvious question, but did you create the flash drive using the OnHub utility? Nothing else will work.
I assume you are also shorting the pins of SW7 as described in the original instructions? What colour(s) does the LED go through?
Yeah, I was using the chrome extension on MacOS to flash to USB drive.
Yes, shorting SW7 as well until the LED starts to blink with purple.
@hmartin, regarding shorting sw7, actually I am not even able to do a factory reset which is the first step. I tried several flash drives I could get access to and none of them allowed me to do it. If I understand the documentation correctly, for factory reset I don't need to use SW7. Maybe this means that the USB drives I was using are not accepted by Google wifi. I do have a couple of USB drives with LED activities, and all of them light up when connected but do not blink - which means there is no activity. I re-checked the wiring many times already.
Maybe I will need to find another USB drive. Have you had any problems with finding a working USB drive? Do you know make/model of the drive you used?
Hi, just wanted to share what worked for me (I had similar issues). First take a look at the flash drives partitions. After using OnHub utility multiple times I needed to clean them up.
Now for factory reset and installing I had to insert the flash drive before starting the device.
Factory reset:
Plugin flash drive
Hold reset button (16sec)
Power on device
After static white, blue flashing, orange flashing the led turned off
After 5-7 min it rebooted
I go blue pulse, fast blue flashing, blue pulse again
Installation:
Power off device
Insert flash drive with OpenWrt
Hold reset button (16sec)
Power on device
Static white, blue flashing, orange flashing
Shorten sw7
Wait for reboot and purple flashing
Shorten sw7
LED went off
Blue flashes, blue pulse
Ping 192.168.1.1
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I used these generic USB A to MicroSD card readers you can buy on AliExpress for ~$2, where the MicroSD slides into the bottom of the USB A port.
There were some issues but mainly related to unreliable SD cards and misunderstanding that OnHub is required to write the image.
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