Yeah exactly,
huawei echolife dg8045
I found this for the device hopefully it can help you know if it can be supported or no
I could know that it has RTL8192ER as wlan hardware and I saw a supported device with this here
https://openwrt.org/inbox/toh/totolink_n300rt
But most likely it doesn't have the same SoC but I hope someone can see if he can maybe port openwrt from another device with similar specs.
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Vspm310 looks to be a 700mhz dual core Arm A9 soc
Looks kinda cool platform , worth trying to do if anyone has one to test on.
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I think this device is only sold in Egypt (not sure) and I doubt that any egyptian (including me) can test anything like that. Really few egyptians even know about openwrt
I am just 17 and my experience with programming languages is so limited. I don't think I have a chance, but the user error404v2 looked like he has the device (most likely), so I hope he can try with it.
I just have one question, how can I get the existing firmware image from the router?
I found this topic here and this guy has a famous router in Egypt, too. (idk the story about vspm310 and Egypt)
It is called HG630 V2 : Adding support for HG630 v2 ( vspm310 - vspm340)
It has the same SoC and it looks like he could get some boot logs but it is surprising that nobody replied to him (lol).
Idk if you can help him maybe because with some guidance he may do something.
I’m a tinkerer myself, just picked up things along the way.
I’m not familiar with dsl standards in Egypt, but, they should be using one of a handful of standards used globally. Have you looked into getting another modem/device from overseas and posted to you? (I am using an avm modem, with Netgear r7800 running openwrt - both purchased 2nd hand.)
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I just wanted to get support for this device because this will help really much people I know that have the same router. I am happy to know that the HG630 V2 has the same SoC because that means if we can get support for one of them we can then get support for the other and really much people in Egypt would benefit from that because ISPs really limit our routers. This router has really good specs in the topic of HG630 V2 he said that it has 16mb flash and 128 mb ram and this is more than enough to run openwrt (of course the flash and ram aren't the only things that matter but this is a good beginning)
This is an Openwrt group on Facebook. Idk if it's official or not.
And this is my Facebook so maybe we can try with together
about buying one from overseas. I thought about it and I'm think of xiaomi Router 4A the 100MB version, it's really cheap, I could found it for 250 egp which is less than 16 usd but the problem is about the shipping and the freaking egyption customs.
Or second thought was buying mikrotik but it's expensive than my budget.
Do you know how to use JTAG cable and get access to bootloader?
It won't be easy to build your first build for even an unsupported platform (yet) so maybe you will have to stay in touch with some famous developers here who built several builds before to get their advice.
I read some articles about beginning with openwrt but I really didn't understand most of them.
Also I want to ask what your isp is. I think only 2 ISPs sell DG-8045 ( Etisalat and Vodafone).
If you intend to start this then you should expect that it would be a long journey, and of course you will benefit from this very much even if you fail.
You both sound keen, and I wish you luck👍But it’s true that adding support for a device can be a hard process.
Hopefully using JTAG to modify things isn’t required. (If it is, that would put using openwrt on this device out of reach of 99.9% of people).
Start with opening it up and finding the serial headers or pinout holes . On all boards without presoldered headers that I’ve seen, the 4 holes were in a vertical column or horizontal row, with one of them having a square pad which is VCC which you should NOT solder. More info here https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/hardware/port.serial
Once you have serial you should be able to then see the bootloader. Again most devices have a tftp daemon built in and hopefully will accept an image in ram. If so, you’re in business and you can then start compiling your initram openwrt image and start trying to get it accepted by the bootloader.
Once you’ve got the ram image to boot up successfully (it will very likely panic/crash on the first few tries) you can then check if all hardware is being recognized/mapped. And all drivers needed and compiled in. Finally, when you’re happy you then write the image to permanent storage on the device flash/nand .
If you still want to make openwrt on this device available to others , you probably want to revert back to oem firmware and test attempting to either build a “factory” openwrt image that can be uploaded through its web interface. Or test the tftp method works blind reliably since most people won’t have serial console .
Sometimes other methods are possible (getting a telnet daemon to start under the oem’s firmware ) but those are less common .
What I’ve found is that collaborating on a thread here on the forum seems to be most effective. Make use of the </> code formatting to share console outputs or configs tried.
The guy from the topic I mentioned ( Adding support for HG630 v2 ( vspm310 - vspm340) ) had serial logs so he got access to serial already.
The HG630 V2 and DG-8045 are so similar and the firmware for both of them looks exactly the same with same options, so I guess the boards are similar too.
We can get help from him and try to help him at the same time.
I will try to help by reading more about beginning guides but as I said my knowledge about programming languages is so limited, so I won't help that much at the end (lol).
Ohh now that's something ! Try to get in touch with him and DM me when you can
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Can you send pictures of your HG630 V2 board? I want to see where did you solder the pins and so
Also send me your facebook profile please so we can have a group chat to bring things closer
I have a question.
If the oem firmware uses linux kernel can we just use it and replace only the system image with openwrt image to keep required drivers in the kernel?
Openwrt is designed as a complete OS, and would fully replace everything on the original device except for bootloader, bootloader config, and sometimes WiFi firmware if that’s provided under a separate partition. So no , not possible to run it under original kernel. But to be honest, it’s usually so old you probably shouldn’t anyway due to security issues.
I’d suggest just posting photos and your analysis on this thread right here. If you take some high res photos top and bottom of your board I might be able to identify the serial pinouts .
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These are pictures of my router but I didn't uncover that silver plate. It's in front and in back of the board and it's soldered
(upload://blVVGtirTtZYGBVV7XlMQB832Yk.jpeg)
I don’t see anything obvious from those photos. Its unlikely but the serial pinout might be underneath the plate sections if you’re willing to remove those. It’s also possible that the manufacturer removed the serial on the production boards after dev and testing was completed...
Idk yet but if say we didn't find any serial pinouts (which will be like that if i understand correctly)
that will mean we have no chance to get a OpenWrt to wok on it?