Interesting recent discovery: at least some modern consumer-grade routers have serial consoles, albeit inconvenient to get to. I bricked a new WNR3500Lv2 by flashing a Tomato image that was meant for the v1 onto it. I wasn’t pleased by the thought that I had destroyed a $60 piece of hardware, but after a bit of Googling I found this post that mentioned the possibility of starting the TFTP server to flash a new image from the serial console. One USB/TTL cable purchase later, I was back in business.