I tried to solder the pads and the resistors in the EAP225 myself but things didn't work out as expected. A friend suggested that I should get the soldering done from a local electronics repair shop. I had almost given up on recovering my access point but the guy in the repair shop I visited finished soldering pretty quickly. I installed picocom, gained access inside my router, uploaded a vanilla sysupgrade image using the HTTP server built into python, and flashed it. PaulFertser from the #openwrt IRC channel on OFTC helped me out a lot during this process. Thanks Paul!
Will I build custom images for my OpenWrt devices after this experience? I probably won't mess around with custom images if the device in question doesn't provide easy access to the serial console or doesn't have a recovery mode like the EAP225. However, the original problem that got me started down this path is still present. Yeah, sysupgrade is still painful.
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Created: 2022-03-15