Blueendless Kimax BS-U35-WF

[reukiodo]

Continuing the discussion from Blueendless Kimax BS-U35-WF:

@chunkeey

Please take a close look of the SoC and the WIFI/Connect LED color. If you have a MT7620A (v2 board?) and the Wifi-LED is red then I would go with U25AWF-H1. If you have a MT7620N (v3 board?) and the Wifi LED is blue then the U35WF is probably the right board.

All the documentation I've found so far seems to point to the opposite:
U35WF = v2 board with MT7620A and red led

Blueendless U35WF

U25AWF = v3 board with MT7620N and blue led
https://forum.archive.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=61854

KIMAX Wifi HDD PROBLEM U25AWF

[reukiodo]

Since I got one of these to use as a tiny torrent box, I first opened it up to verify it's a v2 board and the packaging (box) states it is a KIMAX U35WF as well as the metal case states it is a U35WF. Since I had it all open, I took out my RPi3 and SPI clip to read the chip before even booting it.

I did play around with it for a bit with the OEM OS, but of course it is limited and sucks, though I was surprised that it had ability to download torrents... but it couldn't handle even a ~50MB one.

Anyways, I tried directly flashing the U35WF sysupgrade and after waiting 15min, it was basically bricked. Just flashing lights no matter what I tried. Off/On again, hold reset for various times at various times. Nothing. So I SPI-flashed back to OEM and gave it another go.

I tried a second time with the U35WF initramfs image instead, which flashed and booted successfully! This time I was able to flash to the U35WF sysupgrade image and reset to defaults, which also worked flawlessly. It is annoying that in the build the WiFi is disabled by default, but at least I could DHCP lease an IP from ethernet.

This single 600MHz CPU just cannot handle torrents. Or maybe it's just transmission? Either way I gave up on that idea and now with a 12TB drive it's serving as an off-site backup using an sshtunnel so I can remotely push backups there.

I find these extra packages most helpful with this device:
auc blkid btop cgdisk e2fsprogs exfat-fsck exfat-mkfs lsblk luci-app-attendedsysupgrade luci-app-hd-idle luci-app-ksmbd luci-app-sshtunnel nano rsyncd zram-swap

[reukiodo]

I played around with the OEM firmware and it could never download a single small torrent, seemed to always get stuck. The drive was exfat format so I wouldn't have to deal with permissions issues and smb/cifs speeds were ~8Mb/s.

After successfully flashing over to OpenWrt, small torrents would max the CPU, but at least download slowly. For comparison, the same small torrent on the same network would download in ~30s, but the U35WF took hours, maxing the CPU for the entire time. Seeding wasn't much different, with ~80% CPU utilization and very slow (>1Mb/s) speeds. The smb/cifs share could get up to ~9Mb/s and rsync through ssh can get slightly better, both with quite high CPU utilization though.