Sorry for late reply. Yes, it looks like your connection is bad. Try using the shorter wires, and hopefully of a good quality ( e.g. pure copper wires could be 1.5 longer than the cheap aluminium wires and still have the same conductivity given the same internal thickness )
You have mentioned that you have updated the Bus Pirate firmware. To what version did you upgrade? I always recommend upgrading to the latest Bus Pirate community firmware (the old official one is dead) You could obtain it here - https://github.com/BusPirate/Bus_Pirate
Alternatively, you may try a $3 very cheap CH341A USB programmer, which is also supported by flashrom project and has a much simpler hardware, i.e. it does not have the internal firmware, just a tiny EEPROM of 20 or 32 bytes size + 8 bit CFG register. The board of CH341A usb programmer is small and extremely simple, and the simplicity could be a key to success
Best regards, Ivan
2018-03-17 14:31 GMT+03:00 aadu@airmail.cc:
I apologise if I should write to flashrom mailing list instead and not you directly.
It was night when I wrote that message and I was tired. Bit more of what I was doing.
I was trying to do external flashing following instructions from coreboot wiki. I used command "sudo flashrom -p buspirate_spi:dev=/dev/ttyUSB0 -r filename", and I got: Calibrating delay loop... OK. Found Generic flash chip "unknown SPI chip (RDID)" (0 kB, SPI) on buspirate_spi. === This flash part has status NOT WORKING for operations: PROBE READ ERASE WRITE The test status of this chip may have been updated in the latest development version of flashrom. If you are running the latest development version, please email a report to flashrom@flashrom.org if any of the above operations work correctly for you with this flash part. Please include the flashrom output with the additional -V option for all operations you tested (-V, -Vr, -VE, -Vw), and mention which mainboard or programmer you tested. Please mention your board in the subject line. Thanks for your help! Read is not working on this chip. Aborting.
Was that because it had bad connection or am I doing something really stupid? Then I used "flashrom -L" and it showed that T420 support was marked as "BAD". I bought Bus Pirate v3b and Pomona 5250 SOIC test clip. Have updated the Bus Pirate firmware.
Aadu