Hi, this is my first post here and I'm hopeful you can help me. 

Also, I'm not super familiar with OpenWrt or shell scripts so please bear with me

I am attempting to automate the ssh client on my Linksys router that is running OpenWrt.

The computers/devices that I'm ssh-ing into require passwords.

My initial thought was to make a shell/expect script that uses spawn and expect to fill login credentials. It works fine on my local computer, but it fails on my router. After doing some research, I see this is because OpenWrt uses something called "ash" not bash which is more lightweight. What tools do you recommend I look into for ssh automation on OpenWrt?

TL; DR: How can I automate ssh client on OpenWrt when logins require passwords?   

Install the bash package.  Or use shared-key authentication.