Today I am going to share with my experience of soldering serial port to Asus WL-500W router, just in case you need to recover it from brick.

Follow the instructions on your own risk. I don’t take any responsibility on any damage, although this has worked perfectly for me and for many people.

You need 4 small pins like in the picture above which you can desolder from old motherboard.

Some tools, most important is soldering iron

Now open up your router. Attention, by doing this you will void the warranty!

Locate serial connector placeholder like on picture above.

Solder pins like above. The pinout description is right under placeholder.

Because router and your PC serial port has different logic levels you need a converter.

I used MAX232CPE based TTL – RS232 level converter from local market, it’s really cheap. You can see the picture of my converter below.

I’ve also successfully tested another converter based on MAX3232.

Now connect those pins to your converter. 4 pins need to be connected: RX, TX, VCC, GND. I’ve used black headers from old PC case.

The tricky part was that I knew I had to connect RX0 (router) to TX (converter) and TX0 (router) to RX (converter). But according to pinout marking on both router and converter I connected RX->RX, TX->TX in order to make it work.

Run SecureCRT or PuTTY. Port settings 115200 – 8 – N – 1.

The video below will show you the result in action.

Any question – ask.

Good luck!