Google Wifi No USB

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
21

I mean developer mode.

22

How can i perform this step on GJ2CQ?
"After about 3 seconds, the LED should pulse orange and amber. Now press SW7"

23

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.

1 Like
24

Thanks @C_S827 for the reply. I will give it a try.

25

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.

26

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:

  1. write the factory image (chromeos_9334.41.3_gale_recovery_stable-channel_mp.bin) using the OnHub utility (on a Chromebook)
  2. Restore the router via the soldered USB port, and the SW7 instructions from @C_S827
  3. Flash galeforce and wait for the pulsing purple LED (although SSH did not work after this; you may be able to omit this step)
  4. 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.