I found a few similar topics, but not exactly my situation.
I have an old Archer A7 with ethernet ports fried by electric surge. I am trying to use it as a range extender, but it fails to route traffic received from my main router ( D-LINK EXO A1900 DIR-878 ) to devices connected to the Archer A7 wi-fi radio with the factory provided firmware and OS.
As a solution, I decided to flash it to OpenWRT, I see that there is an official .bin image for it, which is awesome. However, all the docs say that the first boot of OpenWRT will be with wi-fi off, which means ( for my device w/o working physical ports ) bricking it irreversibly.
What is the best course of action to update the .bin so that wi-fi is ON on first boot ( along with some recognizable SSID and pass ) ? Additionally, I may very well have only one shot at this before bricking it...
best way (my opinion) is to make a custom build and include config files in that build
this way, known (working) config will be always at hand, whenever you mess something with router, and of course, at first boot
Using the custom image builder is the solution. I have an Archer A7 with a custom config that sets the wireless on with a known ssid and password. You make a file called 99_custom with your desired defaults, put it in files/etc/uci-defaults and then run the image builder.
Here's part of my 99_custom that should help you. Of course, this comes with absolutely no warranty of any kind, but it should work:
#!/bin/sh
[ "$(uci -q get system.@system[0].hostname)" = 'ArcherA7' ] && exit 0
uci -q batch << 'EOI' || exit $?
set system.@system[0].hostname='ArcherA7'
commit system
del wireless.radio0.disabled
set wireless.radio0.channel='149'
set wireless.radio0.cell_density='0'
set wireless.default_radio0.ssid='your 5ghz ssid here'
set wireless.default_radio0.encryption='sae-mixed'
set wireless.default_radio0.key='your 5ghz password here'
del wireless.radio1.disabled
set wireless.radio1.htmode='HT40'
set wireless.radio1.cell_density='0'
set wireless.default_radio1.ssid='your 2.4ghz ssid here'
set wireless.default_radio1.encryption='sae-mixed'
set wireless.default_radio1.key='your 2.4ghz password here'
commit wireless
EOI