Jeremy and Jonathan,
I hope this suggestion is helpful for testing CAPs that do not provide and WiFi signal and appear to be dead or “bricked.”
I am thinking back to the early days when we were upgrading the Intel firmware. The following suggestions are long, but may help. If the logic is invalid, it would be better to remove or edit this post.
If using USB Recovery Flash drive in the USB jack has not worked and there is no WiFi signal, the only way to communicate with the CAP is the Ethernet jack.
Would the following diagnostic procedure help Bonface and others?
First he needs to test if the CPU is loading the BIOS from the ROM chip. I think the following procedure will work by connecting the Ethernet jack to a router that has fully booted up.
Test the router and the Ethernet cable by connecting and powering up a good CAP after the router has fully booted up.
Watch carefully the pattern of the LEDs on the Ethernet jack as the CAP powers up.
Connect the problem CAP to the router and power up the CAP.
Watch carefully the pattern of the LEDs on the Ethernet jack. These must work if you are not getting a WiFi signal otherwise you have no way to communicate with the CAP.
– When and how do they flash as the CAP is powering up with a router connected?
– Does on LED on the jack continue to flash after the CAP has had enough time to boot up?
– What patterns to you seen on the CAPs own LED?
On my CAP 2.0 the right LED comes on first with long slow green flashes, then the flashes get quicker and shorter and then it goes off and the left LED comes on flashing green and it continues to flash green.
Check the DHCP address table on router to see if the CAP has connected.
I think if we can get this far, we can connect a Windows laptop to the same router and use the Intel firmware upgrade utility starting with a very early version of the firmware and then upgrading version by version to the version we need. However, I could be wrong. The Intel utility may not be able to install the first firmware, but only upgrade firmware that is already installed and work. At this moment I cannot find the manual for this Intel utility. I will add to this post when I do find it.
I believe that we need the CPU to load the BIOS from the ROM chip and then load enough of an operating system to provide a DHCP client on the Ethernet jack and TFTP (trivial FTP) to load the firmware through the Ethernet jack on to the non-volatile memory (NVRAM) or maybe the SSD type of memory on the circuit board.
If we cannot successfully complete Step 4.) and also not get a WiFi signal, I am not sure there is much Bonface can do in Kenya.