Reviving the Tessel 2 - The Middle Rungs
The 18.06 and 19.07 hops carried the SPI fix forward, exposed two false-success flash paths, and found a new rootfs split panic before the 21.02 kernel boundary.
The 18.06 and 19.07 hops carried the SPI fix forward, exposed two false-success flash paths, and found a new rootfs split panic before the 21.02 kernel boundary.
The first incremental OpenWrt hop exposed a real SPI registration break, but only after a diagnostic image made the otherwise opaque failure observable.
The first OpenWrt upgrade jumped a decade in one shot. It built, flashed and booted, but left the Tessel bridge invisible and taught me to value observable experiments over bigger patches.
The Tessel 2 still worked, but its OpenWrt base was a decade old. Before touching the image I had to decide whether upgrading was worth the risk.
Before I could talk to a Tessel 2 I had to get a command line tool from 2015 running on a 2026 machine, which turned out to be a bigger project than I expected and didn't touch the hardware at all.
Before you can fix something you have to know what it is, so I went digging through a decade of stale repos to find out what's actually running on a Tessel 2.
I've got a box full of Tessel 2 boards that haven't been touched in years and I don't know if they even work anymore, so let's find out.