Installing Openwrt on Devolo Magic 2 wifi next

Installing and Using OpenWrt
22

You're welcome! Your information helps a lot. My first suggestion would be to try to boot an OpenWRT build using TFTP. It is quite likely this will allow you to get a shell prompt on the device from which you can then flash another image, likely also an ODM image.

Try following the first three steps of this instruction:
https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commit;h=d3c88811942a9dc9bbb01ca0443ae9cd790d1988

Let it know if you manage to get in. Then we should see if there's an ODM image that could be flashed. (As described in step 6, you'd skip step 4 and 5.)

23

Hello,
How are you? i hope you are doing well, i tried connecting the device through the lan port but it didn't show up, as if nothing is connected, i looked at (arp -a) in CMD and nothing showed up, not sure if im doing it right but i got nowhere, imma a bit of a newby in these things, any ideas what i should try next?
P.S Devolo support told me to try and reset it through the pin button which ofcouse didnt help.
Thanks for your time
Chears

24

Try using Wireshark and follow the second step of the instruction I linked to to see if you see any traffic. Maybe you'll also need to make sure you have the correct IP address configured on your box (192.168.0.100).

25

Hello,
i tried using wireshark and got the these info back, any idea what they mean?, also i asked some IT friends about the problem and one of them suggested shorting the device circuit and that will help solve the bootloop as this method is known to work on bootloop in Nanostation devices which are very popular here, any idea about this?

photo_2024-07-15_22-50-27.jpg
photo_2024-07-15_22-50-27.jpg932×211 72.5 KB

26

Are you sure that only the Devolo Magic 2 Next was connected? Did set your IP address correctly and hold the reset button while powering on the device?

27

Hello, do we have clear steps to setup PLC ? The info is a bit fragmented. From above I just managed to extract firmware with binwalk. What is next?

1 Like
28

Hi @opechunka, I'm afraid there are no clear steps at this time.
I only did some experiments and managed to get things more or less working. I recently obtained an extra Magic 2 device so that I have one free to tinker with.

Once you have extracted the binaries from the Devolo firmware, you should be able to copy them inside OpenWRT and start them similarly as they are started on the Devolo firmware. I can recommend getting shell access on a device with the Devolo firmware running so you can analyze that environment.

Note that you don't need to install OpenWRT on the flash memory of the device. You can do the experiments with a rambooted OpenWRT as well. (That is if you indeed have a Magic 2 Next, which is the ARM version of the Magic 2. There is also a non-Next version which is MIPS based and does not support rambooting.)

If you try something and get stuck, I'll try to respond. We can also communicate outside the forum on this if you want. We should indeed work towards getting a set of instructions and possibly some helper scripts.

29

Hi @jschwart ,
I have one Magic 2, and another Magic 2 Next.

I managed to load and run Openwrt for Magic 2 (https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/devolo/devolo_magic_2_wifi)

But I even couldn't load the OpenWRT for Magic 2 Next from here https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/devolo/devolo_magic_2_wifi_next.

With Magic 2 WiFi running OpenWrt 23.05.3, I tried to make configuration similar to Devolo firmware. I made running most of the apps as at Devolo fimware. But the
ghn_console says that gh.nn port is not avalilable.
One important moment, I installed OpenWrt 23.05, but the original Devolo firmware is based on quite old OpenWrt 15.05 So just transfering binaries from original firmware to 23.05 . It makes me doubt, that it will work at all. What was OpenWRT version that you manged to transfer the missing files from Devolo (15.05) and made it work?

30

Interesting combination :slight_smile:
At least I have both as well now, so let's figure out how to get both up and running with OpenWRT!!

Nice!! Do you also have (the configuration tooling for) the G.hn working?

Great work!! I was also using the newer version instead of that old release. Looking over the GIt commits, I think the issue preventing newer versions to load was resolved.
With regards to the ghn_console tool, I think that I had to specify another device. If I remember correctly, I looked at the dts file to see which one was wired up. But in my commands now I see both ghn and eth0...

Did you see how I am calling the command in the comment above?

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=lib2:lib /lib/ld-musl-armhf.so.1 ./ghn_host -i eth0 -b /tmp/ghn/base/ --name "Magic 2 WiFi next" --serial 1234567890123456 --mac 01:23:45:67:89:AB
 --mt MT3056 --profile 0 --script /tmp/ghn/script  --verbose`

That command gave me working connectivity over G.hn on a then recent OpenWRT version.

This is what the first part of the command I'm using takes care of.

  • LD_LIBRARY_PATH=lib2:lib was pointed to two directories containing libraries I pulled off of the old version
  • /lib/ld-musl-armhf.so.1 specifying the loader avoids the message that the loader from the Devolo version cannot be found (which uses a different name)

Note that the G.hn chip requires that the port speed is set to 100 MBit/s for the initialization to work. The command that the Devolo scripting uses for that won't work on regular OpenWRT, but using ethtool to do this instead will work fine:
ethtool -s ghn speed 100