You’re wandering through a thrift store and spot an old router for ten bucks. Worthless, right? But in this case, it was a Google OnHub, which, at the time, was pretty premium and still isn’t anything to sneeze at. Of course, Google abandoned it long ago, and it runs Chrome, so pass, right? Of course I didn’t. In fact, I bought two for less than $20. The question is always the same: what do you do with it?
OpenWrt will run on the device. That’s a good start, but merely replacing the firmware isn’t much of a project. The more interesting question is whether the hardware can still do something useful. I had a specific need: connect a wired workstation to a reasonably distant Wi-Fi network without running cable and without suffering the usual double-NAT headaches that come from turning the router into yet another subnet. For this, the OnHub turned out to be nearly perfect.
The Hardware
The OnHub was Google’s first Wi-Fi router, built by TP-Link and ASUS in different versions. Mine was the TP-Link model, and one was missing a bit of plastic cowl trim. Under the hood, it has a Qualcomm IPQ8064 dual-core processor — a dual-core ARMv7 — multiple radios, gigabit Ethernet, and enough memory to run OpenWrt comfortably: 1 GB of RAM and 4 GB of flash. The processor also has two network offload processors, but it isn’t clear to me that the stock OpenWrt build uses them.
These devices were expensive when new, but now show up regularly at thrift stores and surplus sales. Installing OpenWrt was straightforward. You do need to remove a screw that covers the magic switch at the bottom, but that’s not a big problem. You can just peel the rubber foot back if you don’t want to remove it. However, the interesting part came afterward.
