FreeMesh node setup?

I hope this is the appropriate place to ask.

I set up the MediaTek MT7621AT router to LAN IP 10.0.0.250 gateway 10.0.0.1 and turned off DHCP so everybody could be on the same network. I connected one LAN port to the Comcast router's LAN port. I changed the SSID for both channels to "Rivendell".

The instructions say to connect a MediaTek MT7620A node's WAN port to the router's LAN port and let it set up. Lights 2 and (3 Wireless) are supposed to flash alternately, then flash together when setup is done. The label on the bottom of the node say 192.168.1.1

The power light comes on steady red. Light 3 comes on steady green and after a few seconds turns off. The WAN light flashes green at a varying rate. No other lights come on.

Sometimes a "FreeMesh" SSID shows up, I think it's the node.

Under Network/Interfaces two interfaces aren't working. When I try "install protocol extensions" I get 'No packages matching "luci-proto " '

Help?

Support for third party builds should be sought from the maintainers of that build. This forum is for plain OpenWrt from downloads.openwrt.org and no one here is likely to know about FreeMesh added features like automatic setup, blinking lights, or SSIDs.

With that said I can offer some advice on setting up your main router. Any serious home network does not use the cable modem as a main router. Treat it only as a source of Internet and keep it outside your firewall (i.e. part of the untrustworthy Internet) by plugging one Ethernet cable from the WAN port of your router to the cable modem. Disconnect any other direct wired or wifi connections to the cable modem and instead have all the users on the inside of your OpenWrt main router.

The default configuration of OpenWrt works for this where wan is a DHCP client and LAN is a static IP. The LAN IP subnet must be different from the IP subnet you get from the cable modem. Ideally you can place the cable modem in "IP Pass Through" or "Bridged" mode so you get a public IP on your WAN port-- then you can use any private IP range for the LAN.

The wan_ppp network is for the cellular modem that may be inside the WE1326, but since you're connected to cable instead of cellular it's going to stay inactive. It is unusual that a third party mesh based build doesn't include luci-proto-batadv but that is again a question for FreeMesh not here.

At 5:36 you can see the same screen shot as yours. That's because LuCI doesn't display BATMAN interfaces properly - but it should all still work.

Based on the video's instructions to configure the nodes - just try again. Unplug a node that didn't configure and plug it back in and try again. Getting nodes to mesh can sometimes be a little finicky.

Under 802.11s MESH protocol, typically the main node (that has internet access) has the DHCP server running. The other nodes have DHCP disabled and obtain addresses from the main node.

Freemesh should take care of all this for you with their auto configuration installation instructions. If it doesn't work then you could try the procedure outlined in the video below.

One way to figure out if a node connected to the main node successfully is to log into LuCI on the main node via ethernet and scroll down to the bottom of the overview page and it will show you connected mesh nodes.

HTH

Here's the video I used to configure my 802.11s mesh networks using LuCI. Easy! Cảm ơn Van! Thank-you OpenWRT!