Add USB-A Port to Router

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

I have an old router with the model RT0010W-D185 (RoHS) REV:0 on the board, a product of the manufacturing company Askey from Taiwan.

However, the router itself has been rebranded by a private local telecommunications company in my country to become a new product called BOLT Bl201. Also, this router has been long discontinued or abandoned, and there is no support center or forum, as well as no open-source software by the private local telecommunications company in my country or the manufacturer, Askey. But thankfully, there is still an unofficial open-source tree by yHpgi , ImmortalWrt and X-Wrt.

Technically, the hardware of this router is similar to the Xiaomi MiWiFi Mini router, except for the 64 MB of RAM and 2 Ethernet ports. For switch configuration, I do not know how to check, but I am pretty sure that this router uses the built-in switch of the chipset.

In short,
I opened the cover of this router and saw that it uses the MediaTek MT7620A chipset, which supports USB 2.0 hosting.

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I then looked around the board of the router and found a pin header for the USB_DP, USB_DM, GND, and 5V+ pins.
IMG_20231215_051713

Note: for the 5V+ pin, the path requires a voltage regulator and some resistors, capacitors, and an inductor. but I decided to use voltage from the positive power source connector of the router for the 5V+ pin, considering that this router can run on a 5V power supply. Also, there is a place that I suspect is the resistor place on the USB_DP and USB_DM lines.

Based on the information I provided above, can the installation of the USB 2.0 host port on the router board be easily done just by connecting jumper wires without resistors and capacitors? Or do I need resistors on the USB_DP and USB_DM pins and/or pull-down or pull-up resistors?

Thank you.

2

Could you clarify how this is related to OpenWrt? (you've mentioned the 3 other open source projects that support this device, but OpenWrt is not one of them)

3

Sorry if I brought up those 3 names.

But currently I am using the OpenWrt firmware for MiWifi-Mini on my router, BOLT BL201. And I feel like the topic I chose was right about hardware, right? Although hardware in general.

Once again I am sorry.

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4

You should upgrade to 25.03 -- the version you are using is EOL and unsupported.

https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=23.05.2&target=ramips%2Fmt7620&id=xiaomi_miwifi-mini

As for adding a USB port, you'd likely then need to build your own firmware with modificatoins in order to bring a USB port to life if it wasn't factory populated.

5

Apart from that, your photo isn't really clear enough, but I think I'm seeing quite a few unpopulated resistors and capacitors in the data path of the USB header. So no, it's not going to work without fixing those spots (adding the missing hardware components).

6

Thank you.

Sorry in advance, but I saw a video on one of the channels on YouTube that explained how to add a USB-A port to a router that was exactly the same as mine and he managed to run a USB flash drive on his router. But I still had doubts, because he only said that just jumper the unknown resistor value place that he pointed with tin or enamel wire.

Well, I think there must be people in this community who know better and can explain it.

7

That is not necessarily a good idea, but it does depend on the circuit design (there could be appropriate resistors elsewhere).

Maybe, maybe not. There is almost certainly a near-identical router that does include the USB port -- if you can find out the values it used, you can probably use the same values for yours.

8

Sorry for the picture... but, if that's the case, what are the resistor and capacitor values ​​in general so that a USB-A port can work on a router that has a chipset that supports USB-host?

Thank you.

9

Thank you very much. maybe I should consider asking people who use miwifi-mini routers, since they are somewhat similar to mine.