Unbricking and Flashing the Yardstick One

So as a part of a long form project I’m still working on I recently acquired a few Yardstick Ones. I’ve always wanted one since they came out many years ago so stoked to have them.

That said, I ended up bricking one which is just par for the course. So I had to figure out how to unbrick it as the Google results aren’t cutting it.

As I successfully got it going, similar to my post on Unbricking and Flashing the Ubtertooth One, I figured I’d post a guide for anyone else who needs it.

This is needed when you can’t get the Yardstick One to enter bootloader mode or you flash the wrong firmware on it (not that I would know about that).

First off, you’ll need your Yardstick One and a GreatFet.

Here’s the pin layout on the Yardstick One:

------------------------------------------
| Yardstick One      2 4 6 8 10 12 14  |
|                     1 3 5 7 9  11 13  ------
|                                        USB |
|                                       ------
|                                       |
-----------------------------------------

And how you’ll want to connect it to the GreatFET.

GreatFET           YARD Stick One
 PIN                 PIN

J1.37 <----- DD -----> 1
J1.2 <----- VCC ----> 2
J1.40 <----- RST ----> 5
 J1.39 <----- DC -----> 7
J1.1 <----- GND ----> 9

Once they’re connected, you’ll want to power the Yardstick One ideally without it being connected to a computer’s USB port.

Then with your GreatFET connected to your box run:

gf chipcon --chip-id

And it should return:

Chip ID: 4356

If it returns a different ID number like:

Make sure the pins are all good and try again.

Now you can erase the firmware on the Yardstick One via:

gf chipcon -E

Once that’s done, you’ll want to flash the firmware, in my case I used the RFCat Yardstick One Firmware – LINK

Write it with:

gf chipcon -w RfCatYS1-201231.hex

Just FYI, if you write RfCatYS1CCBootloader it’s just the bootloader, hence why you’ll want the full firmware even if like in my case, it was the bootloader that I broke.

Now remove all the jumpers from the Yardstick One and the GreatFET and unplug your GreatFET.

Plug in the Yardstick One and you can ‘lsusb’ and see it properly recognized!

Then you can try an rfcat command to open interactive shell on the Yardstick One:

rfcat -r 

Then just check the firmware version and other configurations:

print(d.reprRadioConfig())

END TRANSMISSION