Unbricking tool - GA330

Mind you, I haven't been able to make it work. I managed to brick one of the two GA330 that ChinaChip kindly provided, but haven't been able to restore the firmware. Not that I care much anyway since I don't really need the native firmware running for porting the linux kernel.

Note that the USB boot mode is not used in any of the CC1800 based machines that I know of, due to a ROM problem, so actually you will be using SD card boot to run a fixed USB boot code.

To prepare the boot SD card in windows use the ChinaChipSDBurnTools.exe utility. First argument is the drive letter, second argument is rom.bin file. Example:

ChinaChipSDBurnTools.exe I: rom.bin

This will just write the rom.bin file to sectors 2-17 in the SD card, so it will probably destroy the contents of the card. From linux you can use the dd command. Assuming the SD card drive is /dev/sdi, then:

dd if=rom.bin of=/dev/sdi bs=512 seek=2

You can actually make a boot SD card which is also usable for storage: just make it so that the first (and possibly only) partition starts somewhere beyond sector 17. How to do that is beyond the scope of this post.

Insert the card and plug the USB cable while you press DOWN. The GA330 should be now in USB boot mode.

From there on you need to use the Burning_tool(CC1800 V1.14)_W35.exe tool. The first big button will install the USB driver (at least it will copy the files in C:\Windows\System32\ChinaChipUSB, you might need to point windows to that directory when new hardware is found). The second big button starts the burn process, which you can only do after selecting the IPL, DL and HXF firmware files.

If you succeed unbricking your GA330 with this tool, please report in the comments.

EDIT: if you happen do have your serial console connected, please log and send me the output during the unbricking (57600 8N1, the code in the SD card that implements the USB boot mode will output a few lines 115200 8N1, so you'll see some garbage).