After a week of use, my Banana Pi is unresponsive. It may be because the day before, I disabled a DHCP6 server for one of the interfaces or devices.
I cannot ping its address 192.168.1.1. Any device that connects to it ends up assigned an IP of 169.254.124 which I understand is a default address used by routers when they can't get an IP address.
I understand from OpenWrt's web page on this router is that perhaps I can flash the NAND from a usb stick with the files one-snand-preloader.bin and one-factory.ubi loaded on it. One then powers off the router, insert this USB stick, power the router back on with the front panel button held down until all the front panel LEDs to go off
Yes it is a Banana Pi One with OpenWrt running on it. I haven't got the terminology straightened out yet.
I don't have data USB cable. Is that safer? Read up on it, all it seems is I have to determine the logical device associated with the serial connection and invok it with a "screen" command. followed by pressing the Reset Button on the back. It seems to be a matter of waiting for the boot sequence to start. The instructions are very brief. There is an instruction to press the space key during the boot up sequence to access the NAND or Nor boot menu. I assume I will select the NAND memory. Not sure what happens after that, but I suppose it will be obvious when it is finished.
I managed to boot into initrafmfs. I downloaded my configurations that I had saved before, but it would not boot up again. I am sure that I over rode the previous good ones by saving the bad ones the same day.
So I did a Factory Reset by holding down the Reset Button on the back of the unit during a power on. The unit came back up with all it original configuration settings. I saved them of course. Not much lost and I will fine tune the configurations starting tomorrow.
The OO doesn’t natively support SD cards. You can add an NVMe drive for non-volatile storage, or add a MikroBus SD capable adapter to the onboard MikroBus socket, but that would entail a change to u-boot.
I went around to several vendors and none of them sold anything except sync/charging cables. None of them even heard of a USB data cable.
But I found a online a soruce of a usb-a to usb-c console cable (my computer only takes usb-a type connecters). I presume the other end, the usb-c type will go into the USB Type-C (device, console) port using Holtek HT42B534-2 UART to USB chip in the middle of the front panel.
I got my router unbricked using another method, but I would also like to look into different options.
His issue was because he messed up his config and simply lost control of the device. FWIW he booted into initramfs and did a sysupgrade and promptly restored his saved backup that of course contained his borked config.
Short story long, I gather he did a simple OpenWrt Reset and saved the base config.
It is the hard factory reset method. I didn't have a usb data cable for any network connection to the router. I haven't had time to try it again, but it involved powering up the unit and simultaneously hold down the reset button in the back.
Are there any pure console cables available?
A standard USB-A to USB-C (or even USB-C to USB-C) cable should be good for power supply¹ (charging) as well as birectional data transport.
¹ Once upon a time i got a cable with much to thin/bad wires, that the resistance was so high to cause a voltage drop.
AFAIK, the USB-C console port on the OpenWrt One is a standard USB peripheral, so it should connect to any computer using a USB-C to USB-C or USB-C to USB-A cable.
The USB cable must have the data lines connected (some cheaper cables these days are charge-only and don't have data connections), but otherwise it will be a standard USB cable.
When you connect the One to your computer via USB, the One will enumerate as a USB-to-Serial UART adapter (basically like any other UART adapter, but in this case it is physically integrated into the system).
Keep in mind that this console port (on the side opposite the ethernet ports) is distinctly different than the USB-C power port (which is next to the 2.5G/PoE port) in that the power port is for power only, and the console port is for data only.
