Everyone likes something cheap, and when that cheap thing is a router that’s supported by OpenWRT, it sounds like a win. [Hennung Paul] ordered a Wavlink WL-WN586X3 for the princely sum of 39 Euros, but was disappointed to find his device a rev. 2 board rather than the rev.1 board supported by the Linux distribution. Toss it on the failed projects pile and move on? Not at all, he hacked together a working OpenWRT for the device.
It’s fair to say that a majority of Hackaday readers will have familiarity with Linux, but that’s something which runs on a sliding scale from “Uses Ubuntu a bit” all the way to “Is at one with the kernel”. We’d rate ourselves somewhere around halfway along that scale in terms of having an in-depth knowledge of userland and a working knowledge of some of the internals which make the operating system tick even if we’re apprehensive about tinkering at that level. [Henning] has no such limitations, and proceeds to take the manufacturer’s distribution, itself a heavily modified OpenWRT, and make it his own. Booting over tFTP we’re used to, and we’re particularly impressed to see him using a Raspberry Pi as a surrogate host for the desoldered Flash chip over SPI.
It’s a long path he takes to get the thing working and we’re not sure we could follow it all, but we hope that the result will be a new device added to OpenWRT’s already extensive support list. It’s sometimes a shock to find this distro is now over two decades old.
Next step is upstreaming so we can all benefit!! :D
I’ve already created a pull request on Github.
Looks like it is filogic 820 platform like the OpenWrt One. The post says is was 39EUR in a deal. Very similar or almost the same is xiaomi ax3000t which was about 30EUR including vat and shipping in christmas deal on aliexpress. is is supported in openwrt too except similar issues with new board revisions, newer one have different flash chips and ethernet switch but all is now supported in recent snapshots or PRs. This is IMO great simple wifi6 router for the money, I am running one for almost 1 year without any issues. simple means no usb, no 2.5gbit, just dual band wifi6 and ethernet switch, draws about 4.5W.
and looks like this WL-WN586X3 only has 16MB of NOR flash (same as Cudy AX3000, another hackable Filogic 820), so both are a bit worse than Xiaomi AX3000T which has 128MB of NAND flash. 16MB is nowadays still enough for openwrt but not for long.
Routers good for lightweight single-purpose hosting. e.g. Caching or DNS, etc.
Those overly long antenna cables totally eat what little gain the antennas might have.
What do you figure the loss in dB is on those cables?
They might be a specific length for phase matching as the antennae are quite close to each other. (Also antennae don’t actually have any gain, just beam shaping to concentrate the TX/RX in a specific direction / plane (but a badly designed one can have loss))
Meh. Probably < 0.5dB, which is fine for this application. Change it out to semi-rigid, if you like, but I wouldn’t worry about it.
Source https://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/cable/coaxperf.html
Loss through RG-174 of ca. 0.5 foot at 2.4GHz: 0.75dB
(Source https://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/cable/coaxperf.html)
Gain of 1/2 wave dipole over an isotropic radiator: ~3dB
Nope. However, change those out to semi-rigid, if you want to spend 10x to reduce that already-insignificant loss by less than 10x. https://timesmicrowave.com/cables/sr-086-coax-cables/
It’s really amazing and annoying how many HW revisions there are fore some routers.
And there is no way to find out what revision you get when ordering online, most likely latest and greatest.
Therefore I buy the used now.
I wonder if he will take on the TP-Link routers to avoid the problems in the US with them thinking of banning them? IOW will WRT software ‘fix’ the problem the US has with them?
Banning devices and software based on handwriting. If anyone knows the secret backdoor please publish.
Does anyone else get jealous when projects like these come out? Not the fact they found a decent router for $30 but they can pick one up and spend what I guess is 40+ hours of time making it awesome. I wish I had that kind of time to dedicate to doing something noteworthy.
Actually, it’s been more like 15 to 20 hours over the course of 2 weeks, with at most 2 hours in one session. (And the build of new images is running unattended anyway.) In the process I was on the verge of tossing it into the recycle bin more than once, but that would have been against my hacker honor. And after all, the fun lies in the process, not in the goal.