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Topic: [Solved] The meaning of slow blinking of system & QSS LED?

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Hi, I want to upgrade my TP-Link WR841N v6 from 4M flash to 16M flash.

The 4M flash chip is Spansion FL032PIF, the 16M flash chip is Winbond W25Q128FVSSIG. I've programmed the 16M flash chip via CH341A programmer. The program/data I programmed is the (U-BOOT + ART partition of 4M chip) + (OpenWRT.bin which I build by myself).

After the 16M flash chip replaced the 4M one, power on, now the left (System) & right(QSS) LED keeps slow blinking/flashing, what does it mean?  Bad soldering? Bad program? Wrong chip?

(Last edited by lovetide on 25 Nov 2014, 12:34)

Turns out I created a wrong program which caused an infinite loop of boot&resetting of u-boot, hence the "slow blinking" occured. It should be U-BOOT + OpenWRT.bin + some paddings + ART, I make a mistake on the order of firware partition & art partition.

However, when I use serial port to find the problem, I saw u-boot only recognize 4M flash, Does this mean I need modify the u-boot source code like this thread?

U-Boot 1.1.4 (Apr 15 2013 - 16:30:28)

AP93 (ar7240) U-boot
DRAM:  
sri
#### TAP VALUE 1 = 8, 2 = 8
32 MB
id read 0x100000ff
flash size 4194304, sector count = 64
Flash:  4 MB
Using default environment

BOARD IS NOT CALIBRATED!!!
In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Net:   ag7240_enet_initialize...
No valid address in Flash. Using fixed address
: cfg1 0xf cfg2 0x7014
eth0: 00:03:7f:09:0b:ad
eth0 up
No valid address in Flash. Using fixed address
: cfg1 0xf cfg2 0x7214
eth1: 00:03:7f:09:0b:ad
ATHRS26: resetting s26
ATHRS26: s26 reset done
eth1 up
eth0, eth1
Autobooting in 1 seconds
## Booting image at 9f020000 ...
   Uncompressing Kernel Image ... Error: Bad gzipped data
GUNZIP ERROR - must RESET board to recover

Resetting...

(** infinite loop from the begining **)

^
|---- I use U-Boot to upgraded to a new U-Boot with Web Failsafe, then use the new U-Boot fixed/upgraded the firmware and art, now everything is ok.

(Last edited by lovetide on 25 Nov 2014, 12:43)

Hello lovetide,
Can you please post your backup of the original 4mb flash file?
I was toying around some days ago trying to change the flash with a 8 Mb chip (using the pigback method), and I hard bricked the wr841n.
I had only a serial interface at the time, now I have also a way to write flash externally and soldering skills.
Some help in building a 8mb full flash that I can burn externally  via programmer would be very usefull or, at least a full 4mb dump of the original flash.
The unit was fully working before, so no hardware issue.
If you still have this file it would be great help for me to take a look at it.

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