I just wanted to say thank you for bringing up the idea to reflash the BIOS/EC when my NAS didn't do ANYTHING on start-up, i.e. no LEDs, no FAN, nothing. I was able to get my TS-453A back up with different BIOS files and a slightly different procedure.
When searching for BIOS files for the TS-453A I stumbled upon this thread:
https://mail.coreboot.org/pipermail/fla ... 15002.html There they mentioned that there are two different BIOS versions for my NAS model, one for the Intel
N3150and another one for the
N3160 processors (mine). Apparently choosing the wrong one could result a bricked device. Note that I flashed both the BIOS and EC chips.
The pin assignment of the JSPI headers was equal to the one described in the main thread:
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1 - VCC
2 - GND
3 - CS
4 - SCLK
5 - MISO
6 - MOSI
It turns out the BIOS chip (MX25U6435F) operates at 1.8V and the EC chip (MX25L512E) at 3.3V. So I started with a Raspberry Pi + EC chip at 3.3V and flashed it with flashrom. Note that it is crucial to specify the SPI clock speed (in this case 512KHz, reduce to 100KHz if it doesn't work):
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flashrom -p linux_spi:dev=/dev/spidev0.0,spispeed=512 -w ./QX47EC20.BIN
Then I moved on to the BIOS chip. Because I was afraid I could toast the BIOS chip I tried some voltage divider combinations but my first attempts didn't seem to provide sufficient power. That's why I ended up placing a 15 Ohm resistor between +3.3V and VCC to get at least some drop between the 3.3V and 1.8V lines. I also added 18 Ohm resistors between the CS, SCLK, and MOSI lines - MISO should not need one. Then I reflashed the BIOS chip with
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flashrom -p linux_spi:dev=/dev/spidev0.0,spispeed=512 -w ./QX47AR25.bin
After this step I reassmbled everything and my NAS came back up to life. I'm really happy this could save me from buying an exchange motherboard and/or RMA repair!