So you find yourself with a cam that doesn't boot? Well don't despair, short of hitting your camera with a hammer, they are quite robust.

What's a "Brick"?

When you have a device that no longer boots, we call that a brick. There are actually "hard" and "soft" bricks, which we'll cover separately

Soft Brick

A "soft" brick is a device that doesn't boot all the way, but does have a functional bootloader. The bootloader is the program that's loaded at power-on to initialize the hardware and load the actual operating system etc. In this space, we use the "U-Boot" bootloader, which is a wonderful, powerful, and nearly ubiquitous open source option. In addition to normal booting, U-Boot has advanced features for managing your device pre-boot, including reading and writing the flash storage chip, booting from network (wired links only!), and setting advanced boot parameters. We use a customized U-Boot you can find at https://github.com/gtxaspec/ingenic-u-boot-xburst1

Our custom version will check your SD card for the existence of a file named autoupdate-full.bin, and if it exists (and is the same size as your flash chip!), that file will be flashed at bootup. if you find that your device isn't booting, this should be your first step. grab the latest firmware file for your device from https://thingino.com/ and save it to a MBR partitioned FAT32 formatted SD card as autoupdate-full.bin, insert the card into your device, and power it on. if your device was soft bricked, it will automatically flash and after a few minutes you should see the provisioning wifi network just like when you first installed.

Hard Brick

A "hard" brick is a device where the bootloader is missing or broken in such a way that it does not reach the stage of flashing as described above. There are actually two types of hard brick, which change the necessity of an additional step.

When the processor boots up, it looks at the flash chip for the signature of the bootloader. If found, it proceeds to boot it. Otherwise, it will move to the next boot option. In the case of a device where the bootloader's signature is found but the bootloader is otherwise broken, you need to trick it into moving to the next boot option by using a boot select toggle (not usually available on cameras!) or by using a glitch trick on the flash chip.

The processor will try to boot from the SD card, and search for a bootloader written in raw format to a specific sector on the card. If the signature is not found there, it will go into USB boot mode. The majority of these devices use the only available USB port for wifi, but some do have USB data available via the power port. See USB Cloner for instructions on unbricking via USB.

For most users, the flash glitch trick is going to be the easiest option.

If you have a flash programmer

Particularly if you have a cheap ch341a with a clip, it's quick and easy to use this to flash your device using our scriba software for Linux.

The Flash Glitch

This is a common trick used to temporarily disable the flash device. By sorting pins 5 and 6 for the first second of being powered on, we can force the processor to go to it's next boot option, the SD card using an unbrick image. You will need to disassemble your camera enough to expose the flash chip itself, and use a small screwdriver or other conductive tool to bridge pins 5 and 6 together before powering the device. You can identify the correct pins by finding the dot on the chip that indicates pin 1, then count counter-clockwise from there.

Plug in the power connector, and remove the tool after about 1 second. The window for removing the short is pretty narrow and it may take several attempts to get it right. During the unbrick process, you will get little or no feedback from the device, just let it sit for 2-3 minutes and monitor it for activity. after a successful unbrick, you will see the THingino provisioning wifi just like when you initially installed your cam.

Unbrick Images

You can generate an unbrick image for your device at https://unbricker.wltechblog.com/ and use Raspberry Pi Imager to write it to an SD card.

Video

You can follow along on the entire process as demonstrated in this video.