How to recover a Tungsten700 SMARC

Published on November 14, 2023

In this post, we will show how to recover a Tungsten700 SMARC System-On-Module so that the device can get up in running in fastboot mode and be flashed with software OS images. The Tungsten700 has a DIP switch (SW1) which allows for overriding the normal boot flow and force a boot to the USB recovery mode (OTG/TypeC port). Modify its setting to match the picture below:

Procedure

After putting the SW1 Dip Switch to the ON position and powering on the board, you should see a "Mediatek" device show up in "lsusb"~$ lsusb ... Bus 001 Device 059: ID 0e8d:0003 MediaTek Inc. MT6227 phone ... Now that the PC sees the USB device, download the "bootrom-tool", which is used to load a LittleKernel binary and put the device into fastboot mode: ~$ wget http://linode.boundarydevices.com/mediatek/tungsten700-recovery.zip ~$ unzip tungsten700-recovery.zip Then, run the tool: ~$ ./bootrom-tool Looking for MediaTek SoC matching USB device 0e8d:0003 Opening /dev/ttyACM0 using baudrate=115200 Connected to MediaTek SoC: hw_code[0x8188] Sending bootstrap to address: 0x201000 Jumping to bootstrap at address 0x201000 in AArch64 modeNote: For Windows users, the same procedure applies with the bootrom-tool.exe binary instead. After running the tool, you should now see the device show up under "lsusb" as "MediaTek Inc. Fastboot": ~$ lsusb ... Bus 001 Device 076: ID 0e8d:201c MediaTek Inc. Fastboot ... You should also see the device come up under "fastboot devices": ~$ fastboot devices 0123456789ABCDEF fastboot At this stage, you know how to recover a Tungsten700 SMARC module. Now, you can program any software OS image of your choice. For example, Yocto can be programmed: ~$ fastboot flash mmc0boot0 bl2.img ~$ fastboot flash mmc0 rity-demo-image-tungsten-700-smarc.wic.imgNote: For Windows users, please follow the instructions below to install the Android tools (including fastboot):

For more OS options and flashing procedure, we recommend looking at our Wiki to see all the latest releases.   If you have any issues, please email support@boundarydevices.com.