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A project log for Wink Hub Hacking

Things I've learned and planning to do with my rooted Wink Hub

agm777agm777 07/24/2015 at 03:420 Comments

So after the wink's Epic Fail, I could no longer use the smartphone app. (BTW I made bank on their screw up though, and got a power genius bar for the cost of shipping. Woot! BTW it works great as-is, no tweaking req'd like the hub) So I decided to update to the newest firmware, v 1.01, details on that in a bit. I also discovered this nifty site rootwink.com, with some nice tutorials, one of which I followed. Before I get into how my firmware upgrade went, here's some useful tutorials I found:

Root new hub out of the box

A better tutorial for the cron daemon

Unsupported devices that work

Read about my firmware upgrade experience before attempting these:

Firmware upgrade preserving root

Root any firmware the hard way

So, my firmware upgrade fiasco. I began following the procedure in the "firmware upgrade preserving root" link posted above. Here's where I went wrong: my SSH access was dependent upon entering a root password instead of the RSA key method. If you don't want to mess with the serial terminal, make sure you can SSH with the RSA key. So anyway, I followed the said tutorial without problem up till the step where you reboot into the upgrade/recovery partition. That's where I lost SSH access. Oh, and once set to boot to the upgrade/recovery partition, it won't boot to the normal OS until the upgrade is finished. Essentially it was bricked. Fortunately, you can recover from this using the serial console, as described in the "root any firmware the hard way" link. Here's the difficult part: you have to short pin 29 on the NAND chip to ground on powerup and get the timing just right. Short it while powering on or too soon (I believe about 1 sec after power on), and the bootloader won't go. Half a second too late, and the OS boots. Oh, and those pins are tiny! Anyway, a bunch of bad words later, I got it back up and running.

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