Arcadyan PRV3397B-E-LT

For Developers
1

Hello, I have this router and would like to get openwrt on it, but I have no experience porting.
Here are the specs: https://ayuda.orange.es/particulares/adsl-y-fibra/configuracion-e-instalacion/ayuda-con-tu-conexion-y-tu-wifi/2391-todo-lo-que-debes-saber-sobre-tu-router-livebox-plus-de-orange. I have already gotten into it and it seems to have Broadcom BCM68380. Is it a viable router for openwrt and if so, how can I do it/ be helpful in porting it?

2

No, while you could get the SOC and ethernet supported, its distinguishing features will not be:

  • ftth 'modem'
  • wireless
  • telephony/ DECT
1 Like
3

I have poked around the board, and it seems to be using BCM4321 and Quantenna QT3740BC for WiFi. Is there no hope for at least getting 5Ghz WiFi working?

Also, this router does not have ftth modem anywhay.

4

While the mainline qtnfmac driver has gained support for QT3740BC 'Topaz' about a year ago, Quantenna has never released a matching firmware to actually make it usable.

1 Like
5

Excuse my ignorance, but I have seen that Sercomm H500-s uses the same WiFi chipset and it does appear to have working WiFi in openwrt. Can't the same thing be applied to this router?
If I recall well, cloudflare dns (1.1.1.1) mysteriously did not work with this router, which might suggest...

6

If you read the H500-s' device page, you'll quickly notice that the QT3740BC 'Topaz' isn't supported by OpenWrt, meaning it won't work out of the box. Apparently danitool has managed to extract an older quantenna driver from some proprietary GPL tarball and managed to get it to 'work' on that device, which is laudable, but far away from being a turnkey solution. Yes, a similar approach can probably be applied for the Arcadyan PRV3397B-E-LT as well, but it will require considerable efforts (and the results aren't quite what I'd call 'supported') - leaving 'just' ftth, 2.4 GHz and telephony/ DECT unusable.

If you want to work on it, no one will stop you and I don't expect major hurdles to get the (partial-) device support merged into OpenWrt (the Quantenna question might be contentious (licensing, future maintenance) - is it worth it for this device, considering the functionality that will never be supportable, I personally doubt it.

--
I have one device using a similar approach for its wireless solution, a dedicated RaLink rt3883 iNIC SOC, wired to the internal switch, it's a nightmare to work with and without much hope for the future.

7

Hi,

Recently I acquired this router and I was toying with it.

I have written all my findings in the openwrt wiki prv3399b-e-lt.

I'm stuck at the dumping of the flash binary. It might be well that the serial pin needed is cancelled, my soldering is defective or any other reason.

Also the bootloader is consciously restricted by Arcadyan and I haven't been able to load any tftp image. They are faithful to their policy of obscurancy (sigh).

Any support with both points would be appreciated.

On the other hand, I agree with @slh . Porting products non-FOSS as Broadcom catalog is a tremendous amount of work. It's better to focus on more friendly brands. In fact I was expecting to find a Lantiq SoC inside as previous Livebox.

One thing we could try though is to fully port U-Boot to BCM63xx platform. For this we need firts to deep understand the boot process. Any info in this regards would be appreciated.

Kind regards!