@cncaihua @maurer

Transmission or mldonkey is hopefully on its way. Instead of squeezing them inside the firmware now I am expending them as an extra-root packages on usb disk or nfs share. It makes more sense since by using transmission you will definitely have a usb disk attached. Apart from transmission/mldonkey I am planning to put 3G dongle support, mpd, python, gstreamer etc in the form of extra-root.

Just need to work out local (UTF8) support so you will have file names saved correctly for example Asian characters. I hope to finish them by end of Jan. This gives you some time to solder 64MB memory on WR703N which is highly recommended if you plan to run transmission on it.

(Last edited by s7mx1 on 3 Jan 2012, 14:02)

@willprice94

The gibberish you saw is because the serial console on WR703N is running at 3V while the usb to RS232 you are using is running at 5v. Apart from that there is not much difference.

@willprice94  thanks for the tip. i will keep that in mind. i see many people complaining about that.

@s7mx1 the only thing thats available here for me is rs232... so is it doable with one of those?  maybe a resister to bring it down to 5 or doesnt work that way ?

s7mx1: you can build OpenVPN with PolarSSL, way smaller than OpenVPN+OpenSSL.

@faramisimo

I don't know how you can pull down the voltage easily but you can get a free chip like MAX232 to wire a RS232 to TTL cable. Alternatively you can get a (old) nokia phone cable which is just usb to ttl. This is what I am using currently.

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/AddASerialPort
http://hackaday.com/2010/02/25/nokia-us … n-disguise

@jow
Will give it try. This version of openvpn is statically linked against openssl so it only takes those needed bits from openssl. Hence I am able to squeeze them inside the tiny 4MB image.

Great work by the way.

(Last edited by s7mx1 on 3 Jan 2012, 16:31)

@s7mx1, Hmm, so the router is transmitting 3v TTL? Why does it matter what the voltage is, I thought that as long as the voltage was in the right range that it didn't matter as the data is transferred in pulses. What effect does the lower voltage have? (I was powering the board from usb and had attached the Tx, Rx and ground to the USB to RS232 adapter. I would have thought that the problem would be that RS232 uses inverted logic whereas TTL doesn't.

@willprice94

I am not sure about the inverted logic involved. If you have 2V signal this will present "1" bit with 3V serial console however the same signal would mean "0" bit with 5V serial console. Therefore you cannot use 5V serial console with 3V TTL like those used on most routers.

@s7mx1, Oh OK, I had no idea about that, any idea where I can learn more? Sounds fascinating.

I was referring to RS232 Inverted logic:
3v to 25v = Logical 0
-3v to -25v = Logical 1
0v = invalid RS232 voltage
(Looking at Wikipedia, it looks like positive voltages are used for 'spacing' rather than data transmission and that 3V is borderline invalid : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-232#Voltage_levels )

TTL uses (normal) logic as most people are familiar with, the +ve voltage (5v/3.3v) corresponding to a logical 1 and 0v corresponding to a logical 0.

I'm not really familiar with the details of either protocol, the most experience I've had is with interfacing arduinos (microcontrollers) with the PC to create physically interactive programs -- This hasn't lead me into how the voltage levels are actually interpreted, I just assumed that regardless of voltage level, a period of voltage greater than 0v would correspond to a logical 1.

Hi Sam,

I was really interested in getting the mobile phone 3G-->wifi option, so I flashed the openwrt-nas-28854-tl-wr703n-v1-squashfs-factory.bin firmware to it.

I followed your instruction in inputting http://nas/ to web browser, but the system info page doesn't come up...

I tried telnet and ssh 192.168.1.1 with PUTTY through ethernet, but doesn't seem to have any use to it.

I tired failsafe (really quick blue LED flash) then telnet/ssh... doesn't help either. Was wondering if you can guide me in unbricking my router (I'm a n00b to this, so sorry if I don't understand a whole lot). I just really want to restore back to the original firmware...

Was wondering after flashing the openwrt software, does it automatically make a wifi that I can connect to? If so what would be the router's name?

Thanks for your help!

@clancom

Please do not rush. I don't think its bricked in any way if you have not modified any system files.

The nas firmware will create a wifi AP automatically. The wifi AP has the following settings:

SSID:  NAS-xxxx
KEY:    UEC7wzdu

where xxxx is the last 4 characters of the mac address printed on the back of the router (ignore ":"). It's very likely you will only see one wifi network starts with NAS anyway.

If you are able to connect to the wifi AP then try http://nas/ again using web browser on your pc. This should work.

If you got that far open the following link http://nas/cgi-bin/webif/status-interfaces.sh  from your web browser and please report back the address of the wan interface.

Please don't set wifi client at this stage.

@willprice94

I was referring to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_leve … age_levels. Digital signals will have far more tolerance than analogue signals, this is the reason why we can have exact copy using digital signals which is not possible with analogue signals.

I think you were right that TTL and RS232 are two different protocols.

I flashed the pulseaudio fimware and had issues with it and restored it by booting into failsafe, and using netcat to transfer over the vanilla openwrt firmware.
You should be able to use telnet to get a shell over ethernet in failsafe. What are you having issues with? I'll try and help out.

Hi Sam,
Thanks for the link, that was an interesting read.

@willprice94

What issues did you have? Would like to get it fixed if possible.

You can actually use wget to download firmware from any http web server. You could setup a web server on your pc and use wget which I think is more convenient than the netcat method.

(Last edited by s7mx1 on 4 Jan 2012, 17:28)

I was using the pulseaudio firmware, and wasn't aware of 'mount_root', I'm not quite sure what I was doing at the time, and ended up not being able to connect over ethernet, so I booted up in failsafe mode (I hadn't thought as to whether the firmware had usb storage suport or not and hence didn't plug in a memory stick, neither did I think about downloading to /tmp) I ended up using netcat to pipe the contents of the firmware over ethernet in failsafe mode and flashing.

I think I had trouble connecting to the router (Is the wireless setup in ap mode or sta?) and ended up giving up and just using the normal firmware and installing everything to USB. I'm fairly busy at the moment with exams so haven't really had any time to progress with my project (using the router as a wireless client which will stream internet radio interfaced with a microcontroller dealing with physical IO)

I'll have a bash with your firmware sometime and see if I come across any issues this time (now being a little more knowledgeable in how mtd works and flash layouts etc) and report back.

The latest firmware version 28854-1229 will have wifi AP on by default. With nas firmware the ethernet port acts like wan and you need to connect it to an uplink router. With pulseaudio firmware it acts like lan and you can connect your pc straight to it. However the behaviour of the ethernet port can be switched easily on my crated-from-scratch web gui page. On that web gui page you can also setup wifi client as well so no need to mess around with system configuration files. The wifi client will interfere with wifi ap if you entered the wrong ssid or key and hence disabled by default. I assume you need to set this to have audio streaming over wifi.

Each firmware now has two ways to manage it: ethernet and wifi therefore make it harder to brick.

Any success with this?  Pictures?  What 4-port hub were you using?

Hey guys,

Thanks for the help! But I'm still stuck and cannot access the router via telnet/ssh/ http://nas/

Apparently there is no wifi AP for me to connect to (no NAS-xxxx) and my IP when i connect through ethernet is 169.254.xxx.xxx

Could you give me a quick tutorial of flashing a new firmware/original firmware using netcat? Sorry again that I'm pretty n00b to this...

thanks again!

@clancom - https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php … 35#p146235

I got it all here ready to be installed. However, I have tried to make extroot and/or pivotroot to work properly and been at that for weeks. I seriously doubt that anyone have had sucess with any of those. I have tried four different types of flash disks, followed an insane amount of tutorials to the letter, but every single time it fails, its simply ridiculous and I have almost given up. With extroot I can get it to boot on the flash disk, but as soon as I install more than a few packages it fails to boot properly and ends up in a limbo state with no network access. The pivotroot alternative simply dont work, period.

Tutorials tried:
http://sateliti.info/showthread.php?182 … vn-branche
http://h-wrt.com/en/doc/flash
http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/extro … ot.overlay
http://www.rooot.net/en/geek-stuff/open … enwrt.html
http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howtobuild/ … howtobuild
http://www2.kaufmanfamily.net:8080/blog … root-intro
http://www2.kaufmanfamily.net:8080/blog/page/3
http://open-wrt.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?id=23512&p=1
https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=23901

If someone are able to do an extroot (with more than a few packages installed) I will be much surprised...I don't know if it is becuase it gets loaded in RAM or something, but it aint working...

As for the hardware mods; I do have sourced a SO-DIMM with 64MB chips on it that is confirmed working, and will drop that in there with the flash disk and the hub once I get the #¤%&#&##¤ extroot working.

The hub in question is:
http://www.dealextreme.com/p/usb-2-0-ro … black-1148
It is powered with 5v and fits absolutely perfect inside (needs a touch, remove 0.5mm on one side), resting on the power connector.

The flash disks are the Sandisk Cruzer Edge, very easy to dismantle and you can cut off the PCB end that is serving as the USB male connector. Its basically only the chip left then.

I will upload photos once I get hold on a decent camera.

Hey maurer, thanks for the help! I've been able to telnet into the router but i tried netcat the firmware but it doesn't seem to work... (or i really don't' know how to net cat the firmware to the router). I was wondering if you can give me a brief tutorial on netcat/wget to put the file on to my router and then rewrite on it? sorry again for being n00b. (sorry i'm really stuck on this command line thing...)

also, where can i download the original firmware for the WR703N router(the chinese stock firmware) which I can used to flash?

Thanks!

@Lennong

I am working on something similar to extroot. I can install loads of packages without any problems but I do observe  problems with some of the packages (mpd and python in particular). I think its because of the shared library hell. Basically I want (still trying) all the packages installed on external storage to not use system library files on /lib. This is because the packing system openwrt uses will strip any un-used symbols and hence if the program on external storage loads up the system library on /lib which does not have the needed symbol(s) it will not work at all (mine did segfault).

I will keep you informed if I made any progress on this.

(Last edited by s7mx1 on 5 Jan 2012, 14:48)

@clancom

You can follow this excellent guide here to get apache (web server) installed on your pc

http://www.ricocheting.com/how-to-insta … ows/apache

You don't need to follow step 5) and you can copy any suitable firmware to C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/htdocs/

You will need to note down the ip address of your windows pc which will be used later. Now telnet to WR730N and then run the following command

cd /tmp/
wget http://192.168.1.x/FIRMWARENAME

replace 192.168.1.x by the ip address of your windows pc and FIRMWARENAME by the full name of the firmware you copied over to  C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/htdocs/ on your windows pc. If the download is successful you can carry on with flashing the firmware

mtd -r write FIRMWARENAME firmware

again replace FIRMWARENAME by the full name of the firmware you copied onto your windows pc. WR703N will reboot after flashing is done.

WARNING: Here is the original tp-link firmware but I have not try to flash it back with mtd method mentioned above. It may or may not brick your router so be warned before try it out.

(Last edited by s7mx1 on 5 Jan 2012, 17:13)

Sounds nice! I'll be happy to test it out, its obvious you have the knowledge needed for throw it together. It would be super nice if it also could result in a guide or something, coz as of today none is doing the job.