Sunday, December 7, 2014

Wink hub Shell access through UART

This post is a continuation of my Part 1. If you have bricked your device or want to access the shell follow the steps below,

1. Open the device and look for the UART pins and solder a 4 pin header as i have done. My idea was to leave it permanently so i can have access when needed. Red dotted box on the below picture shows that i have soldered the 4 pin header to the UART pins.


2. Use an FTDI board to connect the wink to your USB port of your computer. The pin on your FTDI board will vary depends on your board. But your should connect like shown below,

WINK GND <--> FTDI GND
WINK TX  <--> FTDI RX
WINK RX  <--> FTDI TX
WINK 3v3 <--> FTDI 3v3 (optional)

if you are using a board similar to mine make sure your jumper is set to 3v3 not on 5v.





3. Install the required FTDI driver from the FTDI website. Now connect your USB to your computer ( i am using a mac).  If you have installed the right driver you will see the USB UART setup under System Preferences -> network (like shown below).


4. Click on the "Advanced" button and try to match the values like given in the screenshot below,


5. Now Click Ok.

6. Install a Program named Z-Term(which in my opinion is lot better than screen) and select our FTDI network. 

7. You have completed all your work, now connect the power supply to the wink hub and you should see the wink hub's console booting messages on your screen.

8. If you want to change any setup the zigbee interrupts won't allow you to open any file using any editor(which will keep overlaying your screen). So i did a "ps -ef" and found the zigbee services and did a "kill -9 ". Now no more interrupts and you are free to make your changes.

9. For rebooting if you did a power recycle it was not saving my changes, so i used the "reboot" command to reboot the wink hub.

10. Good luck and i hope it will be helpful for someone who might have bricked their hub with a flashing pink.