TNETD7300 (AR7) stuff

DSL600E TNETD7300 JTAG and RS232 connections
DSL600E Circuit Board Images and Pinouts
DSL600E/AR7-related utilities: Weird-LZMA squashfs unfucker, MTD partition squashfs extractor and weird kernel image extractor/decompressor, ROM env data and MTD partition extractor, Penisiser, Kernel binary image generator (and checksum calculator), Tiny version of swapon, uClibcisation hack for nbd-client
High resolution image of the CPU area of the underside of the DSL600E circuit board, annotated with BGA324 pin designations
TNETD7300 (AR7) Pinout Details
PDF of the circuit diagram of the Castlenet Technology ECI RD1b Focus Combo 352, an AR7 device

The TNETD7300 is an implementation of the TI AR7 single-chip ADSL interface. It includes DSL, Ethernet, USB (slave only), RS232 and JTAG interfaces all on the one chip along with a MIPS-based CPU. It also has a "VLYNQ" interface which is a TI special thing allowing you to connect other peripherals (like a USB host adapter to get around the dog's cunt that the on-chip one only does slave mode. Yes, the "slave mode only" is a definite; the various sites that list this with a "?" after it ought to get rid of the "?". It does NOT do host mode: the hardware does not support it. The way to get a USB host interface on one of these is to connect a TNETV115 or similar using the "VLYNQ" port).

It is used in various ADSL boxes such as the Aztech DSL600x, Solwise SAR-600x, Netgear DG834x, Linksys WAG54x, Dlink DSL-xxxT and several others. Indeed the DSL600E and the SAR-600E are the same thing - the PCB in my SAR-600E has a DSL600E sticker on it. These devices are cheap (mine was a tenner from Amazon, if that link still works when you come here). They run Linux, and are easily reprogrammed with alternative firmware (for instance Openwrt), so they are quite cool. For one thing, they provide a potential solution to the pain-in-the-fucking-arsery of having an opaque black box stuck in between your own network and the internet, that you can't get into when you want to investigate a problem with the connection. You used to be able to do this by means of an ADSL PCI card, but it seems that all the fucking ADSL PCI cards these days are a whole fucking router, just the same as you would get in an external box, only it's on a PCI card with its ethernet output hardwired direct to a PCI ethernet interface chip, which is utterly fucking shite.

Note: I would recommend NOT to use the routertech.org firmware, for the following reasons (which can be summarised as "routertech.org are a bunch of fucking wankers"):

• You can't even fucking download it without registering and logging in, which is complete and unmitigated arsery and they can fuck right off with it. Nor have I managed to find it for download on any other server which isn't run by wankers. They say this is to make sure you are registered for support, which is a load of horseshit: if you find yourself in need of support, then you can register on their forum for it. Being forced to register in advance whether you need it or not is just cunt, and also suggests that they have very little confidence in their shit working. I have a good mind to register myself and download everything I can find and host it on a non-wanker server myself, but I can't be arsed as yet, especially since I'm recommending not to use it anyway...
• Although the firmware itself is Linux, routertech.org are totally Windows-oriented and don't appear to recognise that desktop Linux even exists. They provide various troubleshooting tools which are all Windows binaries with no source code and expect you to use this crap exclusively to provide them with diagnostic information if you are asking them to help with some bug or fuckup in their firmware. Some at least of these tools are nothing more than wrappers around an FTP client, but they don't tell you what FTP commands they are sending or what responses they expect, so this is fucking shit too.
• They make a huge massive song and dance about how amazingly fucking hard it is to unfuck the ADSL box if you accidentally fuck it up while trying to install their firmware, and bang on about how your only hope of recovering it is to use the abovementioned useless Windows-only tools and you'll be lucky if even that works. But this is NOT FUCKING TRUE. The AR7 boxes, at least, keep their bootloader in a separate section of the flash memory which you have to try really fucking hard to corrupt - it will not happen by accident from trying to load an OS - and the bootloader includes a recovery facility; you can connect to it using FTP over ethernet during a window of a second or two as the thing powers up, and via its FTP server reinstall the original firmware and start again (which is all the abovementioned Windows tools are doing, so it's bloody daft to make a great song and dance about it). Or if that doesn't work you can do it over the AR7's JTAG interface, using a parallel printer cable with the printer plug replaced by an appropriately-wired connector. These boxes are not ununfuckable at all; they are readily unfuckable, and routertech.org are talking a load of nesh-arsed bollocks.

There is, however, the difficulty that if you want to fuck with the box's hardware, it is really hard to get hold of any useful information. Finding a pinout diagram, let alone a datasheet, for the TNETD7300 is absolutely fucking impossible. There is fuck all about it on TI's website these days, and while some of the other stuff that isn't there any more has made it to archive.org, this does not include anything to do with the TNETD7300. (Apparently TI sold the design to either Lantic or Infineon or both, but there is fuck all on their websites either; quite what happened is not at all clear, because while TI list it as "obsolete", various suppliers seem to have bulk stocks of new ones and they are labelled TI rather than Infineon or Lantic, so fuck knows what's going on here.) The various datasheet library websites that show up when you google for it don't have anything either; some of them claim to, but all they actually have is a link to the page on TI's website where it used to be, which is no fucking use any more. I did find an ancient forum thread where someone claimed to have a datasheet, but he was being a tosser about it and only distributing it by private message instead of uploading it to a file sharing site like any decent person would do. So I ended up saying a very large number of very rude words.

Eventually, however, I did manage to find a PDF of the circuit diagram of the Castlenet Technology ECI RD1b Focus Combo 352, which is an AR7/TNETD7300 device. I have copied the pin assignments off this and am presenting them on this page. It doesn't seem to be quite complete as there are only 307 entries whereas the chip is a BGA324 package, which is a dog's cunt, but it's the best I can bloody find.

Also of course most of these abbreviations convey sod all information without the datasheet, but if you refer to the schematic in the above-linked PDF it is a big help in working them out.

Potentially of use to those with a DSL600E (or SAR-600E) are these pinout details and images of the PCB, including a 1200dpi scan of the underside which is a lot easier to follow than the real thing and pinout details for the serial and JTAG headers, and this high resolution image of the crowded CPU area, overlaid with a grid of BGA324 pin designations.

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