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 mode

Note: 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.img

Note: For Windows users, please follow the instructions below to install the Android tools (including fastboot):

Android Tools for Windows 10

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@ezurio.com.