Time for more of this chromebook shit.

Today I finally got myself a soldering iron and the rest of the various bits and bobs I needed to try and flash the boot rom's physically. I spent some hours putting it all together physically, then wrote a little C driver to try and start communicating with the chip. This was made fairly easy by the bcm2835 library, which takes care of most of the low-level register mapping and verification stuff, so all I really had to do was fill some buffers, call some functions, and read those buffers back again.

Unfortunately, I'm only getting 0xff's back, no matter how I try to communicate with the device. The only clue I've had thus far is that when I measure some of the voltages on the pins I get ~.9v, which is right in the middle of where it should be (either 0v or 1.8v). I suspect something strange is going on electrically; there's probably something up with the physical circuitry on the board that's not letting the chip's pins get pulled to ground properly.

At this point all I'm currently left with is frustration, but at least I got pics to show I tried :P I'll make a proper parts, code dump, etc when everything actually works. Until then... more struggle it is!

Here comes the pr0n:

Last Edited on Mon Feb 15 2016 00:45:26 GMT-0500 (EST)