Hi, Karim, I.ve installed padavan's FW. Unfortunately router shows no reaction to the reset button. Same lights are on before and after pressing the reset button.
I'll try more on Sunday, at work, since I don't have ethernet port at home laptop.
Will keep you guys posted.
Best regards!
Silly question but when you press the reset button you keep it down for a while (at least 15s)?
Do the lights stay on? Do you have the wireless lights on? Since you don't have an ethernet cable I am thinking maye you turned off the wireless (I don't even know if it woks on padavan).
Try and press once the wifi button at the back of the router.
Yeah, I've even tried to hold the reset button before power off, during router is working, and during boot. Same effect. I never saw orange light on the router.
Will check tomorrow with wireshark. Good thing you reminded me that I have to take the router with me. 
No before and during boot does not work on this model. It was either disabled on purpose (most likely) or by accident (less likely but I notice that the reset GPIO number is different on this device compared to all the other recent dlink devices).
The reset has to be done after the router fully boots for it to work. it should flash blue only on padavan while it resets NVRAM and then reboots with facotry settings.
The last option would be to open the router and use a TTL (after soldering pins). Hopefully you will not get to this step anyway.
Unfortunately holding reset didn't change anything
Immediately after power on I have POWER, INTERNET and USB LEDs on and nothing could change the situation. 0 packets received on WAN and LAN interfaces thru laptop wireshark.
Seems I have to do more experiments on this. Is it easy to flash it thru TTL? I need to purchase soldering kit now
I don't know if it is related to your flash partition though. Are the lights faint in intensity? Do they stay that way?
This is what happens in the boot process (The way I understand it and see it in the bootlog from serial).
1- power on - uboot is loaded - some checks are done
2- There are 2 partitions of 40mb each that uboot will check and compare. The main one is at 0x180000 and the copy is at 0x4980000. Uboot does not scan the whole 40mb (as it would take too long) but uses the uboot image header of each partition to know the size and will only check the partiton up to that size (about 13mb for padavan i think)
3- If one of the partitions has corrupt data it will automatically copy the sane one to the other one and then boot the first one (this is normally what happens with a bad flash)
4- If both are sane but different then it will automatically copy the main one to the backup one (this is what happens when you upload a new image).
In your case it's hard to tell since the bootloader should have taken care of corrupt data. a TTL will definately give more info about what's happening. I will pm you
Hello, can you update the link? Same situation here, won't lose a lot if router is bricked.
Also, do you have any plans to make a publicly available build if all seems stable?
Thank you!
Hi Kenan,
Here is a new link. Wetransfer automatically deletes the links after a week.
I think this is public enough unless I did not understand your question.
You are welcome to share it as well without any credit if you like it. I think i explained most of the things related to this firmware on this post.
Sharing without credit is scummy, and I don't really know where one would share this to an audience who would find use of this... 
Anyways thanks for taking the time to re-upload.
What I meant by 'making a public release' was to post your build in wiki or a firmware collection of some sort where there wouldn't be a file expiration limit, I'll try to get it into the shout wiki but I'm really new to this.
Thanks again!
Not at all. I am always happy to help but would not mind this at all.
This is padavan and not openwrt. The mods here are just being nice letting this thread run here. As I mentioned before the audience for this device is very limited so I probably don't see the point.
Let me know how you go with the firmware
You'd be surprised how many people want to repurpose their kinda-decent ISP provided router!
I'll let you know how everything goes when I get back home!
Thank you!
As promised, some feedback on the firmware. Low priority, but it seems that the 2.4GHz network statistics are not working. Real-time plots and traffic statistics for the 2.4GHz network are stuck at zero. Can someone else confirm that this issue is present, and not only on my device? Thanks!
Is that in the network traffic option? Mine seems to be working (I never look at it but this is what I get).
EDIT: I did use an updated version of padavan but I don't see anything related to this in the changes in github (or maybe I missed it)
Actually you are right maybe this is the one:
EDIT2: It seems this should be part of the firmware I shared before already.
Thanks for the quick reply! The overflow fix mentioned shouldn't be the reason, as the data I'm getting is a constant zero on the 2.4GHz, which wouldn't be the symptom of an overflow. My initial guess was the assignment of a wrong register, but that cannot be the case if it is working fine for other people.
Hi @kar200 !
I have been searching the web for the stock firmware of DIR-853 A3 and eventually landed in this thread. I am also using the router from my ISP (Etisalat) and I find their custom firmware annoyingly unstable. If you don't mind, would you please share with me the stock firmware of this router and also the firmware that you have developed? I would love to try your custom firmware as I guess it would be much better than the stock.
Thanks in advance for your support!!!
Mj
Hi,
Sure here are the files. Default IP will be 192.168.2.1
If you want to go back to stock (which I doubt you would) it needs to be done through ssh.
UPDATE...
I was able to change the firmware of my routers to Padavan and both are working perfectly fine..
1 was setup as my main router and the other is setup as Access Point..
Many thanks to you @kar200! You've done a fantastic job building Padavan!
By the way, does the firmware has a function to schedule daily or weekly reboot of the router?
Again, thank you so much for your work it as it is really helpful especially for us that are forced to use the custom firmware of our ISP Etisalat... Keep it up!!!
No worries, happy to see it is working well. I have not changed much from the main tree (although it took me a long time to make the changes).
I don't really know all the different options of the router. But a good place would be the main padavan wiki as I believe it was used as a base.
