I recently bought 3 new Acer Vero W6m routers, intending to flash OpenWRT and set them up as dumb APs with Wifi Fast Roaming. At least one of the devices I received had a manufacture date of SEP 2023. No idea what firmware they had, I was too focused on getting all three flashed. However, I did run into the following issues not covered in the wiki.
1. I had a heck of a time looking for the serial pins at first. Turns out Acer has gotten cheeky and covered them with an antenna cable guide. You have to use some kind of pry tool to push the clip off the pads. The consistency of the glue is fairly soft, it isn't hot glue.
2. Following the instructions at https://openwrt.org/toh/acer/predator_vero_w6m, my install experience was a bit different from what the instructions suggested:
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I did not have to hold down the Reset and WPS buttons while powering it on to get the uBoot menu. Doing this would instead boot the router into the factory TFTP flashing mode.
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Each of the serial console commands were copied and pasted into a PuTTY window connected to my 3v3 adapter, one line at a time:
setenv bootmenu_default 9
setenv bootcmd 'mmc read 0x40000000 0x00004400 0x0010000; fdt addr $(fdtcontroladdr); fdt rm /signature; bootm 0x40000000';
setenv dual_boot.slot_0_invalid 1
setenv dual_boot.slot_1_invalid 1
saveenv
setenv serverip 192.168.1.66
setenv ipaddr 192.168.1.1
tftpboot 0x46000000 vero.bin
fdt addr $(fdtcontroladdr)
fdt rm /signature
bootm
3. Once I had it booted into the mini OpenWRT image, I flashed the full image for this router using the web interface. It appeared to go successfully, until it rebooted and went right back to the stock firmware. Marking the two boot slots as invalid did not work.
4. I decided to look at the Predator W6 wiki, since the two are mostly identical: https://openwrt.org/toh/acer/predator_w6
5. I found the additional install instructions which walk you through zeroing out 128 bytes of each mmc partition. I decided to give it a try, so I booted the router back into the mini OpenWRT firmware, and then using SSH I ran the following commands:
root@OpenWrt:/# cat /sys/class/block/mmcblk0p5/uevent
root@OpenWrt:/# cat /sys/class/block/mmcblk0p7/uevent
The uevent entries for both partitions matched the Predator W6 wiki, so I went ahead with the DD commands:
root@OpenWrt:/# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk0p5 bs=1 count=128
root@OpenWrt:/# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk0p7 bs=1 count=128
6. After corrupting the boot partitions, I used the OpenWRT web UI to flash the full OpenWRT image again. The flash completed and the router rebooted. I watched the serial output, and the bootloader noted that both partitions were corrupt, and it appeared to only then boot using the bootcmd settings.
I have never used OpenWRT, so as a newbie I do want to say at least for the W6m article it could be made more clear. There is a section about "OEM installation using the TFTP method" which really doesn't give any information. The step that talks about flashing the initramfs/kernel image wasn't clear at first, until I found the mini OpenWRT image on the Firmware Selector Tool.
However, now that I have all three APs up and running with 802.11r configured, it looks like these routers enabled by OpenWRT are going to be exactly what I need, and I am very happy with the result.
