Has anyone gotten a vanilla OpenWRT build to run properly on a bpi R4? I've tried flashing the latest snapshot and the last two releases (24.10.0 and .1) to an SD card and they all behave the same--the router boots but the Wi-Fi does not come on and it can't be accessed by anything except serial port; even ssh is refused. No obvious errors are logged on boot.
The image provided by the vendor works perfectly, so I assume the hardware is ok, as is my card and image burning tool, but I can't update this build as it is fairly old now and many of the opkg snapshot packages it references have gone missing. I would generally just feel a lot better using "mainline" firmware.
Keep in mind that this particular hardware is more of a modular devboard, than a particular device or finished product. It originally didn't ship with any wireless cards inserted and can be equipped with a variety of different wireless cards, meaning there isn't one true setup for it. Accordingly you may have to check if wireless modules and required firmware blobs for your radios are installed. The logs, dmesg in particular should tell you more.
That makes sense, ty. I watched a YouTube video with someone describing exactly how to make this setup work so I thought I would be clever and reuse that config. Looking carefully at the video, he used a snapshot build I can no longer access, and now I'm in over my head
Still, he did get it to work, and it's gotta be pretty recent since he used apk on the terminal My hope is that someone here has already gone through this...
I have it running on plain vanilla OpenWrt (24.10.0 at the moment) - not yet in "production" but doing tests. All 3 networks are up and I can connect using Macs, iPhone, Windows laptop.
So I first set the country (in my case CH) to all WLAN interfaces 2g/5g/6g
configured a single SSID for all interfaces 2g/5g/6g
set wpa2/3 and set a password for 2g/5g, and used wpa3/sae only for 6g (otherwise it did not work)
initially I set a low bandwidth (eg. only 20 MHz for 2g) or 80 MHz for 5g network - and afterwards could increase that.
I just connected to the SSID and client automatically moves to 2g/5g or 6g network depending on capabilities
As there are some R4 cards with a issue (transmitting power is limited to 6 dBm), try to move your client closer to the router (1 m or so) and try again. There is a fix available to get this problem solved, but this is not yet included in vanilla OpenWrt - perhaps you suffer from that problem?
I was able to get wifi working using your advice. I am still not able to ssh in when hard wired, but I was able to do everything you said on a shell using the USB to TTY tool that came with the hardware and putty to connect to the serial port. I think maybe the fact that my modem is assigning 192.168.0.* addresses while OpenWRT wants to assign itself to 192.168.1.1 might be a problem? Not confident on that statement. In any case, I just found shell commands to do what you described without much trouble.
I can connect to the web console once connected via Wi-Fi, and as you indicated all types of devices I've tested with so far are working!
I don't see the blue wifi lights on the box itself, but I'll live
The antenna strength defect was definitely not the issue in my case.
Do I need to keep this thing on 2G RAM indefinitely or can that be reverted after getting the WiFi working?
I just connected a ethernet cable directly from my laptop to a LAN port (WAN-ports do not expose luci/webgui) to do the initial setup and then just used WLAN to configure the rest.
If you already have a LAN on your network and use the 192.168.0.* net, the router there does not know where to route 192.168.1.* addresses, so you usually can (depending on your existing router...) configure a static route or disable the static 192.168.1.1 address of your bpi r4 and configure dhcp, then your home router will assign a 192.168.0.* address to your bpi r4.
It all depends how you want to go forward with your bpi R4 (you want to replace your existing router? Want to extend the existing network with the bpi R4? ...)
The LEDs in the Wifi board also do not seem to light up for me... and I never limited the RAM to 2G but also did not enable this "WO" stuff yet... I don't know the status for that feature.
My hope is that someone here has already gone through this...