There are a lot of great recommendations on this forum about the best, fastest, and easiest devices to buy to flash OpenWrt onto, but there’s one superlative that especially interested me: the cheapest.
Let me begin by saying that between the deprecation of 8MB flash/64MB memory devices for future builds and the slow but sure movement toward WiFi 6 and 7, the device I’m going to talk about is not one I would wholeheartedly recommend to just anyone with any use case. That said, it does support 802.11ac (5Ghz) as well as 802.11n (2.4Ghz), and it has just enough space to run OpenWrt 24.10 with LuCI, include translations to a language other than English, and even support WireGuard (that is, if you build these things into your image as I did. Through opkg, it might be a bit of a squeeze).
This isn’t my main OpenWrt router – I found the Xiaomi Mi Router Gigabit to suit my needs years ago, mostly because of its 1000/100Mb Ethernet ports, and also the relative ease of flashing images onto it. However, that device cost me the equivalent of about $27 USD, and where I live in the global south, that’s a prohibitively expensive price for quite a lot of people. That (and a lifetime love of taking things apart to tinker with them) inspired me to buy a few cheap WiFi repeaters and see if I could find one that met the following specifications:
- Under $10
- Minimum 8Mb flash/64Mb RAM
- 5Ghz support
- Easy to flash without requiring special skills or advanced knowledge
The last one in particular would be tricky, but what good is an under-ten-dollar router if you need $45 worth of soldering equipment, adapters, and to know what UART and baud rates are to upgrade it?
After a few disappointments, this was the one I found that met all of my requirements:
at time of writing, 147 MXN equals $8.01 USD
The vendors of these sorts of cheapo generic products are never going to respond to you asking what chipset it has. They don’t know or care. Luckily, when it arrived, it said right on the box that it contained MT7628A + MT7612E, a combination that several devices in the Table of Hardware contain, so I knew I was on the right track.
I prodded the stock firmware a bit to see if I could access anything unusual. As with many such devices, it came with Telnet enabled, no way to turn it off, and no listed password to access it. According to nmap, it was also probably running kernel 2.6. (This turned out to be correct – kernel 2.6.36, to be exact, built with GCC 4.6.3 in Buildroot 2012.11.1 – in November of 2023. Crazy, right?)
Not wanting to brick my test device, I decided to solder into the UART first so I could experiment with it, and get back to figuring out how to flash from stock firmware later. Ralink MIPS (ramips)’s bootloader lets you interrupt the boot and load another firmware image solely from memory without flashing anything to disk, so I downloaded all of the OpenWrt images for devices with the same internals and tried flashing each of them until I found one where both the 2.4Ghz wifi radio and the 5Ghz wifi “just worked” right away. In this case it was the TOTOLINK LR1200. With that default image flashed, I had just barely 1MB remaining of disk space, so to add some features I built an image.
I followed the instructions on the build system documentation to configure a build with the same packages as the one you’d get in the Downloads section, but before building, I went back into menuconfig to add the wireguard kernel module as built-in, along with Spanish as the default language and the LuCI-proto-wireguard package. The image I built also had wifi “just working” and didn’t seem to have any unforeseen bugs, so I booted the device back into its stock firmware to have a look at where I could get it to flash from.
On the “advanced settings” page, there seemed to be a “firmware update” option, but it didn’t work at all. I checked the source code and realized that the page was creating iFrames for four different .html pages, one of them being called upgrade.html.
So I navigated to http://192.168.168.1/upgrade.html, and lo and behold – it let me flash OpenWrt! Right from the browser!
That was a lot easier than I had expected.
My hope is that someone looking specifically for the cheapest possible option can find this post, and also this same device. If it had a brand name, I’d list it, but hopefully with the information given here you can find it, despite everything being so generic on most online marketplaces when it comes to Wifi routers in the “economic” category.
As for my own device, it’s perfect for a travel router. If I accidentally leave it behind in a hotel room, like so many pairs of sunglasses and Android chargers before it, then I’m out eight bucks – not so bad, really.
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P.D: There were going to be a lot more images in this post – screenshots, mostly – but I only just created this account so I’m limited to one per post. If possible, I’ll post the others in comments*
