Well, it's happened and it only took a couple of days. Wednesday night I got home after midnight (ready for bed) to encounter a Pink Screen of Death on my post-contract on-the-Blink EVSE. A "critical error" had occurred, but naturally it wouldn't tell me what it was. (We can't confuse the poor dumb customer with useful information, now can we?) I was simply instructed to cycle my circuit breaker. I did, and the pink screen reappeared. Nothing useful on the webserver either.
Muttering profusely, I hauled out the Level 1 EVSE and my heavy home-made #10 extension cord and dragged the footstool outside so I could reach the outlet. It finished normally, 12 hours later.
This afternoon I went out and performed my threatened lobotomy on Hal. The only hard part was finding a sufficiently long ice pick to reach the Blink's frontal lobes through the hole I drilled in the side of the cabinet...
Seriously, it only took a couple of minutes to pop the covers off, find and remove the 10-pin control cable and 3-pin power cable between the J1772 board and the Hydrogen controller board. I didn't bother removing the 3-pin RS-232 control cable between the two.
I buttoned it all back up, restored power, plugged it into my Leaf and promptly heard that familiar musical rhythm: beep... whirr... beep beep... KLUNK. Worked beautifully, though of course the screen remained dark. I didn't even have to wait the usual 5 minutes for the control computer to reboot.
What a piece of garbage Ecotality has created. I'm still angry about all my wasted tax money.