So, I bought a Nexx WT3020F router about a month ago on Aliexpress. It arrived the other day, and I set about setting it up. I tried following the guide linked below. IIRC, I tried both mtd0 and mtd3, because I had seen in another guide that you were supposed to use mtd0. When mtd0 didn't work, I switched over to mtd3. After I flashed it, the telnet connection went dead. I waited for about an hour just to be safe, and then I tried to reboot it. Now it doesn't work. There is no WiFi connection broadcasted, and if I connect my laptop to the LAN port, all I get is a spinning wheel under ethernet. The light doesn't light up.
I've attempted to boot it while holding the reset button for 10 seconds, but that hasn't worked either. Has anyone got any ideas? I searched the forums before posting, as well as google, and while I did find some posts, none of the solutions I found worked.

I appreciate any and all responses.

Also, it turns out for some reason I can't post a link. The tutorial I followed is the securityskeptic article talking about the Nexx router and turning it into a tor relay node. I tried to link it, but I got an error.

You will have to open your router and solder TTL serial cable to rx, tx, gnd pins to see what's happening on the console.

So I got a CP2102 in the mail today, and did just that. I soldered a wire to tx, to rx and to gnd. I tried following a tutorial, which I'll link below, but I didn't get any output in the console. Do you have any advice on what's happening? I'm just shooting in the dark here, but I think I may have overwritten UBOOT. Is there any way to recover from that?

snakelab.cc/2014/12/05/howto_flash_openwrt_on_wt3020.html

I'm not sure what you mean by the spinning wheel, but if you connect the Ethernet port to a switch or some device that has a light on each port and the light never lights up, it's not booting at all.  Probably because the bootloader has been erased.  You will need a SPI flash chip programmer to write the bootloader directly to the chip.

mtd0 is the bootloader.  Most builds of OpenWrt have the write protection flag set in the kernel so mtd will not be able to write to that partition.

(Last edited by mk24 on 13 Feb 2018, 05:09)

I wrote the firmware using the CLI, and I never even made it to OpenWRT. It was the factory standard OS the whole time.
By spinning wheel, I mean that little icon that shows that the ethernet recognized the device as something, but wasn't able to connect to it. There are no lights under the ethernet ports, so I can't use that as an indicator. All I have is the CP2102. There are no ports on the board that I can use other than TX, RX, and GND. Am I toast, or is there anything else I can do?

You could try to switch TX and RX.

you could try pinning up a console wire to hit the console through the ethernet port, it would work if something went weird on soldering to the board.

If the Ethernet ports don't get initiailzed, the bootloader is probably not running and you won't see anything on serial.  The most likely reason for this is that the flash partition where the bootloader is stored has been erased or corrupted.

Connect a device that has a hardware based green light or other way you can see layer 1 link status to one of the Ethernet ports and see if the ports come on.  It is not necessary to see if any data can be passed, only to see if the carrier signal is present on the wire.

(Last edited by mk24 on 12 Apr 2018, 18:17)