TP-Link TL-WR703N Specialized Firmware Generator

Seen at the center of this image is a TP-Link TL-MR3020 which is basically a TL-WR703N wireless router with a few extra LEDs. We’ve seen a lot of projects using this hardware and that’s because it’s cheap and ripe for hacking. The devices can run OpenWRT, a Linux distro for routers that greatly extends the functionality when compared to the stock firmware. Now a couple of members of Shackspace — a hackerspace in Stuttgart, Germany — have written a script that automatically generates specialized firmware for the router. That link goes to their wiki page about the script, but you may find this overview post to be an easier read.

The concept is that gathering specialized hacks into easy to flash packages does away with a lot of configuration headaches. For example, if you just want to play around with an NFC reader for a day-long event you can connect hardware like what is seen above and use the NFC-gate option of the script to flash firmware meant to drive it. So far there’s also support for streaming a USB webcam, serving as a USB network bridge, and a few others. But the whole point of this is to make it simple to roll new firmware mods into the script that make it easy to preserve the work for use at a later time.

[Thanks Hadez]

10 thoughts on “TP-Link TL-WR703N Specialized Firmware Generator

    1. steven,
      REALLY? You “found something interesting?” Or you, as the “CEO” of the indiegogo team are doing a bad job of “advertising”…. I’d be a lot more interested in this device if you were not so bad at being sneaky…

  1. Hello.
    I wanted to know if anyone can help, I bought a WR703N, but by charging the firmware in English (since it came in Chinese) has been roasted, I managed to connect through the console, but this is what it says on the console :
    # # Booting image at 9f020000 …
    Uncompressing Kernel Image … Too big uncompressed streamLZMA ERROR 1 – must
    RESET MB
    LED turning on for 1s …
    id read 0x100000ff
    flash size 4194304, sector, count = 64
    Flash: 4 MB
    Using default environment

    In: serial
    Out: serial
    Err: serial
    Net: ag7240_enet_initialize …
    No valid address in Flash. Using fixed address
    No valid address in Flash. Using fixed address
    : CFG1 0x5 0x7114 CFG2
    eth0: 00:03:7 f: 09:0 b: ad
    ag7240_phy_setup
    eth0 up
    : 0xf CFG1 0x7214 CFG2
    eth1: 00:03:7 f: 09:0 b: ad
    athrs26_reg_init_lan
    ATHRS26: resetting s26
    ATHRS26: s26 reset done
    ag7240_phy_setup
    eth1 up
    eth0, eth1
    Autobooting in 1 seconds

    anyone know how to fix it
    I need help
    thanks

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