"I think I bricked the router"

It happens to everyone eventually. You upload an image, the progress bar stalls, and the router goes dark. The power light blinks in a pattern you've never seen. LuCI won't load. SSH refuses to connect. Pinging 192.168.1.1 returns nothing. That sinking feeling sets in: I just turned a working router into a paperweight.

Take a breath. A "bricked" router is almost never as dead as it looks.

Two kinds of brick

It helps to know which situation you're actually in, because they're very different:

• Soft brick — the router still boots something. The bootloader is intact; only the firmware is broken or half-written. This is the common case, and it's almost always recoverable from home with nothing more than an Ethernet cable. A bad image, a wrong settings change, or an interrupted upgrade usually lands you here.
• Hard brick — the bootloader itself is damaged and the device shows no signs of life at all. This is rare, and recovery is harder: it typically means opening the case and connecting to a serial console (or a hardware programmer) to re-flash directly. Daunting, but still often fixable.

The vast majority of "I bricked it" moments are soft bricks.

The recovery mindset

Before reaching for tools, slow down and work methodically — panic-flashing a second wrong image is how a soft brick becomes a hard one. The recovery path almost always relies on a feature the manufacturer built in for exactly this moment:

• Failsafe / recovery mode — many OpenWrt devices boot into a minimal recovery state if you hold the reset button during power-on. From there you can push a clean image.
• TFTP recovery — a large number of routers will, at boot, look on the network for a firmware image served over TFTP and flash it automatically. You set your computer to a fixed IP, run a TFTP server, power-cycle the router, and it heals itself.
• Serial console — the last resort and the most reliable: connect directly to the board's UART pins to watch the boot process and re-flash from the bootloader. Needed mainly for hard bricks.

Which method works depends entirely on your specific model — the button timing, the IP to use, the image format — so the concrete steps live in the hardware guides.