RAK7249 won't boot, how do I reflash it?

Issue: RAK7249, new, does not boot.

Setup: N/A

LoRa® Server: N/A

Details: at my job we bought 3 new RAK7249 gateways. One of them will simply not boot. It clearly powers up because the LEDs will turn on, but I can’t connect to to the device nor see any WiFi signal.

I think trying to reflashing it would be a possible solution, but I could not find documentation on how to do this.

I’ve tried restoring factory settings by pushing the reset button for 6+ seconds without luck.

Hi @lisandro can you try to connect through the ethernet port as described here?

Yes, I did try connecting trough the ethernet port without luck. In fact I mentioned the WiFi just because it also doesn’t comes up, I’m using the ethernet connection to set up the device.

My approach to diagnosing systems such as this is to connect to the console serial port (probably 57600,N,8,1, or possibly 115200) and see what U-Boot and (if it gets that far) Linux boot messages say.

But it’s not clear there’s an official path to doing that, and what you learn may not indicate a readily fixable cause, though it would certainly be interesting.

Generally the idea on systems such as this is that you do a “factory reset” via a button or command which wipes the writeable overlay filesystem, restoring to the state of the read-only system image. If that system image itself is somehow corrupted (though, how?) then installing a new version would probably take TFTP over wired Ethernet. If the bootloader itself is corrupted, that’s at the level of JTAG or replacing the flash chip.

The serial might help you “see what you are doing” while trying to invoke the factory reset, or otherwise identify the issue. But if a factory reset doesn’t fix it, it’s probably beyond end-user self-help.

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Were you able to fix your RAK7249 gateway?
Did RAK support help you with the fix?
Thanks in advance for the update!