I received my GoodFET PCB in the mail the other day and ordered up the parts from Digikey to build it out. The parts(not including the PCB) were about $15. My friend James actually built it for me on his hotplate since this was all surface mounted soldering and I didn’t feel like doing it with my iron. That part went fairly easily and when I put it in the USB the lights flashed so everything seems to be working as far as I can tell. When I brought it back home, I plugged it into my Gentoo system and worked through the next steps.
First off, I needed to install some prereqs:
emerge pyserial
emerge pysqlite
I also ended up having to add “sqlite” as a USE flag in the /etc/make.conf and then rebuilding python for that library to be available:
emerge python
Then I installed the firmware with:
./goodfet.bsl –fromweb
After that, I was able to perform the self test which took about a minute and a half:
./goodfet.monitor test
Everything went pretty smoothly as promised. Next challenge is that I am going to attempt is to use the goodfet to unbrick a wrt54g.
