Is there any way to try out a nightly build on Loco M2 XW?

Destroying the caldata on the devices AREDN currently supports on Ubiquiti ( I recall TPLink is similar but would have to verify all details before I say it follows all of these details) is actually very hard.

Most common method I understand is that high voltage surges fry the chip, usually from an ungrounded node ‘near’ a lightning strike and the build up of voltage on the pairs of the network cable.

After that you get into developers just plain making mistakes that ends up overwriting the data. This isn’t easy to do in the current system, the boot loader protects the config portions and the images created by the build system current tag the config space as reserved read only. This makes it pretty darn hard for us to mess and somehow damage the chip data, we can’t do it without messing up at a very very low level,..

Next method would be something in the bootloader system, it has a concept of data and config portions and shouldn’t  (thought I haven’t tested it) let you damage the  config table in just a firmware flash via the reset button with TFTP. It has some low level commands when you are plugged onto the serial port that can read and write arbitrary data and they could probably be used to write raw data to the partition that holds the config, but these are not commands that would be ordinarily used either. If you manipulate some of the saved environment details you could make all of the above dangerous but again that requires a conscious act to change these variables.

An extension of the bootloader and th developer mistakes is also possible where honestly I can’t say how but between a combination of bad code and what seems to be the bootloader messing up (possibly because of the bad code) I know we really thrashed a few devices during some recent testing,

I want to say from memory we might of erased caldata on at least one unit (TpLink) but we were also asserting some manual control over some chip pins accidentally that we have no clue where they went. I don’t recall off hand any Ubiquiti devices loosing caldata as part of the recent major changes, I know we knocked the bootloader around and got into some very funky states but I can’t off hand recall us not being able
to recover the units after, but there have been so many tests it’s possible/probable I’m forgetting an incident.

So ultimately it’s not impossible, but it’s not the easiest thing to break either. If we get other devices that might change, but at least with current Ubiquiti that’s where we are.