Hi there 
Quick intro to the whole situation:
I got a used Toniebox from ebay with “a minor fault” that the seller “didn’t have time to look into”.
Obviously the problem was bigger than claimed (so as a warning: never trust ebay sellers that have multiple boxes to sell. They’re professionals and know that a repair is not possible or too complicated).
Long story short: The box first seemed to work mostly fine, but just couldn’t get a stable wifi connection. The signal is super weak and I can barely connect to it during the initialisation when holding my phone directly to the bare pcb.
The initialisation didn’t go through and the box was not usable (since it couldn’t download a firmware update).
I got the UART connection soldered up and working, but even so couldn’t convince the box to at least work in offline mode.
Now I did the mad thing, bought a replacement cc3200 from Ali and (apparently) actually managed to solder it in in my first hotair job.
(yeah… that Kapton tape seems sus…)
Now the new problem is that I can’t seem to properly flash all backup files back to the new chip, although the UART connection seems to be generally ok.
What I tried:
- “format_flash”, which seems to work
what seems suspect is the flash size of 1024, since my original dump is 4096kb.
Could it be that the chip I have has a too small flash? 
The journey continues.
Writing the first post I noticed the flash size after the format_flash command being too small for my dump (1M vs 4M dump).
0xbadbee mentioned in the telegram group that there is a size option for the “format_flash” command, which I then found in the cc3200tool github
So in order to give the flash enough space to take in the whole dump, I set it to 4M with
Formatting to 4M seems to work:
But after flashing the complete flash dump with
and then trying to read the filesystem, I still get the same error as before with the 1M flash:
And it continues on
Now I re-formated the flash again and instead chose to write the individual files with “write_all_files”.
This time I get a proper listing of all files without errors:
A potential problem I can already see though: the slashes aren’t correct.
So I fear I’ll either have to look into the cc3200tool code to correct the slashes there… or flash the files individually with the correct path format
Nevermind: the slashes don’t seem to be a problem and the box actually boots.
AND IT DOES HAVE A PROPER WIFI signal now!!
Now I have to figure out what to do about the MAC and ID, since that seems to have changed with the new chip now.
I’ll continue the journey another time
The slashes seem to be a windows problem, which is a bug in the cc3200tool. By using linux you may fix that.
To set the mac address, you’ll have to create a /sys/macadd.bin with the binary representation of the mac address (just the bytes)
Be sure it correctly connects to the cloud. The box has a servicepack for the wifi chip you may need to install.
Some info about it here: Bricked my box? - #13 by 0xbadbee
Is there a reason to use the 1.4.0 service pack instead of 1.5.0?
It is the version that is shipped via OTA over the cloud. The 1.5.0 could also work.
I wanted to write a little write up of the process, but didn’t have the time yet.
So just as a short update:
The box actually works with the new chip (and a custom batterypack and DIY USB-C charger cable).
So in case of not working wifi with a cc3200 chip, there is actually hope 
1 Like
