In below topic I talked about my bricked router.
I am now going to connect to the UART to get access again.
But I hit a practical problem; the board only has holes; no pins (see picture below).
Should i solder pins to the board or can I just plug in a pin and will that be stable enough to connect?
Note; my UART-USB cable is coming next week.
Refered topic (edit: corrected the link);
Picture of the UART pin holes:
[Moderator edit: removed erroneous link, picture did not upload properly]
you can just put a pin through the holes. if you want to make it more secure, use the tip from a toothpick or the pointy end of a dental floss toothpick to keep it in place.
I already have so many hobbies: I will not start fishing ;-).
I managed to connect to the router over the UART connection (to USB and to my PC).
The router spits out the terminal messages. I just don't seem to be able to interact with the router from my PC using Putty. Like i cannot interrupt the boot process by pushing 'enter'.
Could this be because of the connection?
Walter
Could this be because of the connection?
That's likely.
Since you can see output, the RX pin and GND from your adapter is connected well, but since you can't send, then the TX pin (from your adapter, RX on your router) is probably not connected well.
There's lots of good suggestions on improving it, (fishing wire, plastic toothpick) perhaps find something you can wedge carefully in the hole, preferably plastic so it doesn't leave a residue and making the connection worse.
You can also try moving the cable a bit, I try to get a little tension on the cable in the right direction so that the pins gets pulled sideways and are not sitting loosely in the hole and can make a good connection that way.
If nothing else works, soldering a header is the most stable, but has risk of accidentally damaging the board, depending on how good you are at soldering.
With some practice you'll get a good connection without a header.
Using fishing line as a "tool for jamming pins tightly" sounds like a nice/fun idea. Practical tip 
I might use that with some of my newer routers that have only holes.
(Any narrow plastic thread should actually work similarly.)
tried again and now it is working properly...
I guess it was just a bad connection. Interesting topic ;-).
Thanks all for the feedback!
If you are interested you can still help me get my bricked device up an running...
Create a new thread about it.
Sorry; i had added the link about the bricked device in the opening post ;-).
And I got it up and running....
