Hi,
I have been struggeling the last couple of days to install OpenWrt on two Devolo Mesh Wifi devices. The device seems to be similar or identical to Devolo Magic 2 Wifi Next. So I installed similar to the respective instructions in the git commit (https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commit;h=d3c88811942a9dc9bbb01ca0443ae9cd790d1988). Finally, the Mesh Wifis are working somehow a dumb APs - as planned -, and I wonder what is needed to improve support by OpenWrt ...
Meanwhile, I can share some information gathered during the installation:
Precautions
This is a powerline device. This implies that it will contain portions that will carry high voltage when in operation. You should not operate the devices without suitable precautions. Ignoring this can be dangerous.
Opening of Housing
Housing can be opened after removal of the two screws. Section at the reset button hole is a good starting point, gap can be opened a bit to get an appropriate tool in. Starting at that position, you can work your way around the device using some force. Depending on your experience and your tools, this will leave marks on the housing.
General Structure of the Device
The device consists of two PCBs connected by a board-to-board connector. One board, the one facing towards the wall when installed, carries the PLC modem, the other one, facing to the front, of the device, contains the SoC and the ethernet ports.
Location of Serial Port
The serial port (3.3 V) is located on the SoC PCB, in form of a 6-pin row of soldering pads with a 2.54 mm spacing. The position is labelled "J5". Pin 1 is marked by a small white triangle. Pins I identified were 1: GND, 4: RXD 5: TXD. Due to the level of 3.3 V, you will need a suitable interface.
After logging into the initramfs image
The device will boot the initramfs image as described in the instructions. However, that image does not include the uboot-envtools package, so fw_setenv is not available. I don't recall how I managed to the to tools onto the device, I think i put a squashfs image there using scp and executed from there. If the tools were included, the installation process would be a bit more straight forward ...
After installation of the Snapshot image
The PLC device is connected to eth0. You would probably want to remove eth0 from the bridge until the PLC device is supported by OpenWrt. This does not seem to be the case at the moment. According to explaination in the commit, to be able to use the PLC device, one would need the respective tools which cannot be made available at the moment. I wonder whether they could be extracted from the original firmware image. There does not seem to be a firmware image available for download at the moment, so this would involve reading the original firmware from the flash before installing OpenWrt.
Are there others using or thinking about using the Devolo Mesh Wifi or Magic 2 Wifi Next with OpenWrt at the moment? Has anybody managed to use the PLC device?
Kind regards,
Mali