First time openwrt failsauce for WL-WN570HA1

I am an openwrt newb. I purchased a wavlink WN570HA1 only because it was support by openwrt. I downloaded the bin files, tried upload both through the firmware upgrade feature of the wavlink web interface and... nothing, nada, looks the same. reboot device. still wavlink proprietary firmware running. WTF? help an newb!

Stay with the stock firmware. OpenWrt support for this device is not as good as you might imagine.

any reason there is no link for "Firmware OpenWrt Install URL" on the device support page? there are only links for "upgrades"...

Is there any other image than sysupgrade.bin required for installation?

The sysupgrade bin is the only file needed. But it must be installed with TFTP.

Developer's notes here:
https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commit;h=a160f50d4f240019fafe95e80701ebb871c788fe

So you need a TFTP server on your PC, rename the sysupgrade.bin firmware to 'firmware.bin' and place in the TFTP server root directory, static IP the PC to 192.168.10.100, then boot the router with the reset button held down while connected to the PC. It should download and flash the file then reboot into OpenWrt.