DATAPUISTOKEMISTI

ZTE MF286 4G router is built around Qualcomm QCA9563 soc with 802.11bgn, QCA9882 802.11ac wlan, QCA8337 gigabit switch and MDM9230 LTE chip. There's also tempting serial port knowing all components used are already supported by LEDE (that has replaced OpenWrt). Photos here .

While looking for something else I spotted Buffalo WLAE-AG300N "range extender" in our IT "treasure room". Noticing it's OpenWrt supported decided to give it try.

I think ethernet switch and wireless aren't supported by opensource drivers so even with OpenWrt booting on Huawei B593u-12 it's not much use. USB connected LTE module is not detected, my guess is that some GPIO needs to be toggled to enable it. PCA9555 GPIO expander would need some work too. Also 256MB NAND-flash is missing, only 16MB SPI flash is found.

CFE> boot -elf -tftp 192.168.1.100:openwrt-brcm47xx-mips74k-vmlinux.elf

I'm using OpenWrt with following customizations to send temperature readings to EmonCMS. Hardware is noname Ralink RT3052 router (WR512-3GN) and Dallas DS9097U compatible USB 1-wire adapter. Main reason for going with Image Generator instead of compiling custom firmware was to keep binary and API compatibility with packages from stock OpenWrt repository. Package selection below leaves 168kB free on JFFS2 filesystem. Drop editor, Luci etc. and you'll have a lot more free. If you don't need to patch init scripts like I did due bug in WR512-3GN support you can simply install packages and apply scripts over top of official OpenWrt release flashed to your router.

Enabling extroot on OpenWrt 12.09-rc1 is bit tricky. Likely reason you're trying to enable extroot is lack of free space i.e. router with 4MB flash. Problem is that unless you're interested in creating custom firmware images there's no space left for tools to enable extroot using old procedure. Following has been tested with TP-Link MR3220 v1. It's ar71xx with 32MB RAM and 4MB flash being lowest end of currently supported OpenWrt compatible devices.

OpenWrt Attitude Adjustment Beta2 images for Zcom ZCN-1523H a.k.a Planet WNAP-7300 are broken. You can do recovery by opening case (three hidden screws under label on back) and soldering serial port (115200-8-N-1, TX closest to AR71xx, RX next and then GND, ignore fourth pin). After adding serial port cause of fault was quite obvious (kernel lacks support for ZCN-1523H) and also how to repair it without adding serial port.

Recently I managed to flash bad custom build of OpenWrt to my Buffalo WZR-HP-AG300H rendering it unbootable. See below for tips how to flash latest OpenWrt over TFTP from Windows XP client.

It turned out to be just like I suspected , Planet WNAP-7300 (at least with firmware "2.0.3(PL)4") is exactly same device as Zcomax ZCN-1523H-5. Atheros AR7240 rev. 2 at 350MHz, Atheros AR9280 rev 2 5GHz radio, 32MB RAM, 8MB Flash and two 10/100 Ethernet ports. Therefore it works with Zcomax OpenWrt firmware. Bridge performance seems acceptable, around 70Mbit/s real world in bridged mode and 60Mbit/s if OpenWrt is doing NAT. With around 25 meters nearly line-of-sight performance is ~40Mbit/s. All tests uni-directional TCP (FTP/HTTP) with no other traffic than ICMP echo going on at the same time.

Didn't see this documented anywhere so here it is. How to use Finnish dy.fi dynamic DNS service with OpenWrt router.

As OpenWrt Wiki lacks this particular example (there's other L2TPv3 examples) I guess better I document it somewhere.

Instructions were tested with Ubuntu 11.04.

My notes on setting up extroot on USB memory stick with OpenWrt on TP-Link MR3220 v1.