Category Archives: Firmware

Meraki MS210/MS225 hardware overview

The Meraki MS210 and MS225 series switches offer 24 or 48 ports of Gigabit Ethernet, four SFP/SFP+ uplink ports, a dedicated remote management port, and stacking capabilities via QSFP.

Meraki MS210-24 and MS210-48

The MS210/MS225 series are based on the Broadcom BCM56160 “Hurricane3” ASIC, and the Broadcom BCM82756 10G PHY. PoE models contain the Broadcom BCM59121 PSE controller. All switch models have 16MB of SPI flash (MX25L12805D), 256MB of NAND (MT29F2G08ABAEAWP), and 1024MB of DDR4 DRAM.

MS225-48LP internal PCB

MS225-48LP switch internals with PoE midplane removed

The Meraki codename for the MS210 and MS225 series is “brumby” and all brumby switches run the same firmware release (switch-arm). The MS250 is essentially the MS225 with hot-swap power supplies (similar to the MS220/MS320).

Keen readers may be wondering why the MS210 series has only SFP ports while the MS225 has SFP+ ports, given they are identical hardware and run the same switch-arm firmware. The answer is market segmentation; Meraki decided to artificially limit the speed of the MS210 SFP ports to 1G, even though the MS210 hardware is capable of 10G via SFP+. Early in the boot process switch_brain checks the switch model, and if it identifies as the MS210 series the SFP port speed is limited to 1000M.

The stock Meraki boot process uses u-boot on SPI to load a “bootkernel” (also from SPI), which then initializes NAND and using kexec boots the main firmware. The firmware layout follows the standard Meraki practice of having A/B firmware images: bootkernel1, bootkernel2, part.safe, part.old.


If you wish to flash your MS210/MS225, you will need to remove or socket the SOIC8 SPI flash (U18). This is because the ASIC is powered by the same +3.3V voltage rail as the SPI flash, and will attempt to boot when you attach your flashing device, which interferes with your ability to read/write the contents of flash. I prefer the Wieson G6179-10 SOIC8 socket (available from Adafruit). People outside the US will probably find it easier to desolder the flash and use a SOIC8 socket with prototype wires, as the G6179-10 is difficult to obtain for a reasonable price.

MS225 with SPI flash socket installed

Unlike the MS120, the MS210/MS225 do not implement secure boot, so all that is needed to develop on the platform is to recompile and flash u-boot from the Meraki GPL release and then interrupt the boot process and provide your own firmware build (e.g. via TFTP).

The UART header is J31 on both the 24 and 48 port models and follows the standard Meraki UART pinout (1: VCC, 2: Tx, 3: Rx, 4: GND) at 115200 baud.


The Broadcom SDK for the BCM56160 series implements the packet engine in userspace, using the linux_kernel_bde and linux_user_bde kernel modules to interface with the ASIC. In the Meraki firmware, the packet engine is a component of the userspace click daemon, which loads the bcm_click shared object during click router initialisation.

There are no public datasheets available for any of the Broadcom chips used in the MS210/225. While you can find information on OpenBCM, as far as I can tell the API provided by OpenBCM (via the kernel modules) which is used to implement the packet engine has no public documentation. If anyone has more information, please get in touch 😀

Siglent SDS1000X-E license recovery

I know I am late to the “recover your license keys for your Siglent oscilloscope” party, but since I recently went through this to recover my license keys, there is a much easier approach that people don’t seem to be aware of.

There are several forum topics and blog posts on the subject of recovering license keys for the Siglent SDS1000X-E series.

Most of the methods described involve extracting the cramfs, modifying the password hash of the root user, and flashing the modified image as an update.

There is a much easier way to obtain the bandwidth and option licenses of the scope while using only official Siglent firmware images.

  1. Download the firmware 6.1.25R2
  2. Extract the archive and copy the ADS file SDS1004X_E_6.1.25R2.ADS to a FAT32 formatted USB device
  3. Follow the instructions in the 6.1.25R2 archive to “update” (downgrade) the scope firmware to 6.1.25R2
  4. Navigate to the SCPI control page of the web management interface of the scope
  5. Run the following SCPI command: SHELLCMD telnetd -l/bin/sh -p9999
  6. telnet to the scope’s IP address on port 9999
  7. Dump the memory to the USB device: cat /dev/mem > /usr/bin/siglent/usr/mass_storage/U-disk0/memdump
  8. sync and umount /usr/bin/siglent/usr/mass_storage/U-disk0
  9. On a PC, run this python script with your scope_id, serial, and the path to the memory dump
    python3 siglent_sds1000xe.py --serial SDSXXXXXXX9999 --sid 012a3456789bc012 --dump /media/usb0/memdump.bin
  10. Install the 200MHz bandwidth license through the SCPI control page using the command MCBD
  11. Install the options licenses SCPI control page using the commands:
    • LCISL AWG,<code>
    • LCISL WIFI,<code>
    • LCISL MSO,<code>
  12. Reboot the scope to apply the changes
  13. After verifying that the bandwidth and option licenses are installed, update the scope firmware to the latest release (6.1.37R8 at the time of writing)

There is no need to repack the cramfs with a new shadow file containing a known root password. Additionally, the license key extraction from memory doesn’t appear to work (or at least, did not provide valid license keys for options on my scope) so I’ve borrowed the contents of a python script from the SDS2000X thread to provide option license keys for the SDS1000X-E. The script is available here.

Note that the 6.1.25R2 firmware has the root password siglent_sds1000x_e. However the password is not required in any of the above steps.

Modifying the Sercomm AD1018 for NAND flashing

My previous work has mostly involved SPI-based flash, but more modern devices like the Meraki MR33 have only NAND storage and there are instances where it is necessary to modify the contents of NAND using hardware means (e.g. to downgrade u-boot before flashing OpenWrt).

There are a wide variety of hardware NAND flashers available on the market, however they are often expensive, proprietary, and slow. Hardware flashers like a Teensy++ 2.0 running NANDway or the NANDLite (which are both quite inexpensive options) will work for reading data, they are not at all convenient if you want to modify the data and rewrite it. Every NAND chip is unique and has its own bad blocks which you should take into consideration. The net result using these programmers is that you have a very slow workflow: you must obtain a consistent dump of the NAND through a device which often reads at only 100KB/s, modify the contents (recalculating ECC/OOB), and then write it back to the NAND.

Why bother with all of this when Linux has a very robust and fast mtd subsystem in the kernel?


Enter the Sercomm AD1018.

Sercomm AD1018

The Sercomm AD1018 is a DSL router originally produced for Vodafone España and based on the Broadcom BCM6328. There are two hardware revisions, which are the same apart from the amount of RAM: v1 has 64MB of RAM and v2 has 128MB. It can be found on eBay from Spanish sellers for less than 20€, and is supported by OpenWrt. As a bonus, you can easily modify the hardware to add SPI flash and then boot OpenWrt off of SPI.

With the operating system booted from SPI, you have a free NAND interface to do what you want. What do we want? A cheap, Linux-based NAND dumping and flashing platform!

However, there is a problem. The “NOR” OpenWrt image for the AD1018 doesn’t include support in the kernel for BRCMNAND so although there is support in the device tree for the onboard NAND, it is unusable in Linux. This makes the device significantly less useful as a NAND flashing platform.

This is easy to solve though: copy the kernel configuration for the smp target, which includes NAND, to the generic target:

cp target/linux/bcm63xx/smp/config-default target/linux/bcm63xx/generic/

You can download the binary image to flash from here.

After flashing the NOR release of LEDE as described in the installation instructions, simply flash the new NOR image with BRCMNAND support using sysupgrade:

sysupgrade -n /tmp/openwrt-21.02.1-bcm63xx-generic-sercomm_ad1018-nor-squashfs-cfe.bin

After rebooting you should now be able to access NAND flash from OpenWrt:

[    0.877092] nand: device found, Manufacturer ID: 0x92, Chip ID: 0xf1
[    0.883812] nand: Eon NAND 128MiB 3,3V 8-bit
[    0.888227] nand: 128 MiB, SLC, erase size: 128 KiB, page size: 2048, OOB size: 64
[    0.896083] bcm6368_nand 10000200.nand: detected 128MiB total, 128KiB blocks, 2KiB pages, 16B OOB, 8-bit, Hamming ECC
[    0.908376] Bad block table found at page 65472, version 0x01
[    0.915264] Bad block table found at page 65408, version 0x01
[    0.923011] 1 fixed-partitions partitions found on MTD device brcmnand.0
[    0.930026] Creating 1 MTD partitions on "brcmnand.0":
[    0.935356] 0x000000000000-0x000008000000 : "storage"

Until now, apart from installing the SPI flash, we have only addressed software issues. The kernel output above is the stock NAND which is soldered to the PCB, not exactly practical for flashing NAND from other devices.

The OpenWrt wiki suggests hand soldering a TSOP48 socket to the PCB. I am here to tell you there is a much easier method.

You can purchase TSOP48 sockets for around $5/piece from distributors (or AliExpress) however I dislike these because I still sometimes have difficulties soldering the 0.5mm pitch of TSOP48, and wrecking a TSOP48 socket while soldering gets expensive quickly. In my opinion, there is a cheaper and easier solution: use a 24 pin 0.5mm pitch FPC connector and a TSOP48 socket for a TL866II.

The TL866II TSOP48 socket can be purchased for under $4 on AliExpress. The FPC to 2.54mm breakout PCB, 24 pin FPC cable, and 24 pin 0.5mm FPC connector can all be purchased for dirt cheap (~$0.10/piece) in lots of 10+ from AliExpress. I feel this provides numerous advantages over a surface mounted TSOP48 socket:

  • FPC connectors are very inexpensive, so if you accidentally destroy it while soldering, no big loss
  • Since the TL866II TSOP48 socket is connected via FPC cables, you can easily bring it between devices while you are iterating the flash contents

Thankfully, the designers of the TL866II TSOP48 socket routed every pin. However, you should be attentive because the pinout of the TL866II TSOP48 socket is not what you might expect:

When mounting the FPC-24P 0.5mm breakout boards, note that the odd-numbered pins are always on the outer row.

All that remains is to desolder the NAND flash and solder the FPC connectors to the AD1018 PCB

Finally, after cutting a small slot the flat flex cables can be routed outside the enclosure and the TSOP48 socket can be securely mounted

Now it is possible to put the TSOP48 NAND from another device into the socket and use tools like nanddump and dd to manipulate the contents. Since it is OpenWrt, you can even mount a remote filesystem using NFS, sshfs or similar to have even more storage.


While I feel the AD1018 is a very good NAND programmer for the price, there are a few important considerations to consider when comparing the AD1018 against commercial NAND programmers:

  • You cannot hot-swap NAND (however, it boots quickly and has a physical power switch)
  • Since brcmnand is built-in to the kernel and not a module, the router won’t boot if NAND is not present
  • Linux attempts to generate a bad block table when one isn’t present, and this may take quite a long time to complete
  • The AD1018 is likely difficult to obtain outside Europe