I finally got around to manually reloading the firmware on two Unifi UAPs that I’ve had laying on my desk for months. It didn’t go so well last time around.

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Step one was cracking them open and connecting my usb ftdi adapter to the onboard uart. The bootloader talks at 115200 baud, btw.

As the bootloader does its thing, it prompts you to press any key to interrupt the boot process. I found that by the time I saw that message, it was too late. I started spamming the space-bar as soon as it iterated the onboard flash and ram. Based on the recovery guides I’d originally read when at the boot-prompt I ran:

urecover

which spawns a tftp server listening at 192.168.1.20 and then tftp over a copy of the firmware.bin from the BZ2 folder on your controller. When I did that I got the following:

Error code 2: Firmware check failed

Of course. I spent some time running that particular message through google this time around and found this thread, which revealed the magic sauce.

mtdparts default


Then launch

uresecue

and go through the tftp process. All better. Haxxy cat was not so interested in this recovery, unfortunately.