Hi guys welcome to electrical projects channel, today I’ll show you how to upgrade RAM memory
of your router, but before that let me explain how I came to this crazy idea, and why I want
to do it.
Well, if you’ve watched my previous video, how to flash a chip of a router with a programmer
then you know that all this started when I’ve flashed some crappy tp-link firmware that
had some stupid downgrade lock in it, so I bought a programmer and got the ability to
flash whatever I want directly into the chip, and I even made flash chip easily accessible
outside of the router’s housing.
That turned out to be a pretty good idea because I quickly could restore my router if I did
something wrong, Soon after I made that video I started experimenting
with an alternative firmware…
I flushed OpenWRT, and it changed everything, my router became much more stable, and I gained
a lot of new functionality, soon after that I upgraded my flash chip from 4MB to 16MB…
more flash memory means I can install more packages, but now I’m faced with a new limitation,
I have not enough RAM, my Router has 32MB of RAM memory, and it is enough for many use
cases, but I think 64MB will give me more freedom for future experimenting.
So I bought 64 MB RAM chips, I bought 10 Chips for 6 and a half us dollars, which seems like
a reasonable price, and today I’ll try to unsolder old 32 MB RAM chip and solder new
64MB chip.
I hope my Router survives all this.
There are ways to unsolder the chip just with a soldering iron, but now I have a soldering
station with a heat gun so I’ll use it.
The whole process should be simple, but I don’t have enough experience… before this
video I’ve tried to remove a couple of integrated circuits from old PCBs,
But the router’s PCB is important and I don’t want to damage it, also I want the
old RAM chip to survive as well.
Well, after applying flux I started heating pins of the chip, the temperature was about
350 degree Celsius, but the chip didn’t want to come out, the chip is most likely
soldered by lead-free solder.
Solder that contains lead usually has a lower melting temperature, I don’t want to overheat
PCB and chip, so I decided to apply solder that contains lead.
And after this, I started heating the chip again.
Chip quickly came out this time, now it is time to use solder wick in order to remove
excessive solder.
Now it is time to solder the new chip.
And after the chip was soldered and cleaned I turned the router on, but it did not work,
the router simply did not boot.
After further inspection, I found what the problem is.
Look at this picture can you see what the problem is? no?
Look here closely, some pins aren’t soldered properly, and I didn’t notice it before.
I definitely need to buy a good microscope.
Well, after I soldered pins, I inspected all of them with a needle and they seem to be
soldered well this time, so I connected the router to the power supply.
Now the router starts.
Success!
And if we go into the graphical user interface we can see that the router recognized the
chip correctly, I did not do any changes to the firmware, it started working with the
new chip automatically.
And that is all for today, next time I’ll try to add a USB port to the router, but it
will be much more difficult because USB pins are not directly accessible, so I’ll need
to drill SoC, I doubt that it is possible without a microscope.
Thank for watching see ya next time.