Is or should be TUOSHI N519D/N4000 supported by OpenWrt?

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Url to buy the products: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FR1BS9G/
Manufacture page: http://www.tuoshi.net/download.asp

They are Outdoor High Power Wi-Fi Antenna. The N519D model is dual band with an AC600 wireless adapter (RTL8811 chip) and N4000 is single band with a RT3070L chip.

The manufacture provide a Linux driver, but searching for old posts here RTL8811 and RT3070L chips seem to have problems to run with OpenWrt. What is the current status and what can be expected in the short or medium term?

2

It does not seem to be supported:

3

Yes thanks, that devices are not in the list of supported devices and not one want that they will supported directly, because they are not the type of device where to install OpenWrt. What is need here is a driver that can be installed in a device with already have OpenWrt which an USB port where you can connect the Touchi antena and then it works inside as a new radio of this OpenWrt device.

So, my question is if there are a package with a driver that works for that devices in OpenWrt, but thanks.

4

I assume you need/want two of these, right ?

If the setup is based on a STA and AP kind of link. RTL is a bad choice, since the public drivers seldom support AP mode.

Does the device present itself to the OS as a wifi radio, or a network card ?

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5

Thanks.

No, just one. This is not for create a point to point access. The idea here is capture an exiting wifi signal that we can see with a normal antenna, but that have not enough power to be useful. In this case, when it is only a few meters, with a powerful antenna you can directly capture the signal and replicate it, without having to spend so much money on a point-to-point directional connection.

So i can assumed that if it's supported by the Linux kernel it will be supported by the kernel included in OpenWrt, at less some day? That is ask if the kernel included in OpenWrt is exactly the same or the Linux kernel is configure to not include some drivers? There is not any possibility that someone implemented the driver as a kernel module outside the Linux kernel and that driver exist in the OpenWrt repository but without be part of the default kernel modules?

I can not answer this or anything really. I have not the device in my hand. I'm asking to decide if is or not a good option to buy it. It's also difficult to know what is exactly the chip that this devices have, because the manufacture provide a driver for a chip differently to what is promoted that the device have.

Taking on account the manufacture driver, the model N519D seem to have a chip RTL8821AU, that have not a kernel driver and the model N4000 seem to have a chip RT5572 that have kernel driver. This is a confuse information, should be good to know the real information, maybe from some one that already buy that devices.

But again thanks.

6

Hello,

is a firmware dowload available to look into?

Today I analyzed the firmware for the LT22 (similar to LT21B). It's a Ralink chipset and I figured out that it's phoning home (via MQTT and reverse SSH shell). Quite likely that model does the same. So only usable with an open firmware.

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7

is a firmware dowload available to look into?

Hello @micw, thanks for try to help.

Your idea is pretty interesting, but I do not know. The manufacturer barely provides the drivers and some guides with an image quality that leaves much to be desired. If it is available online, probably only the Windows driver will know where to look for firmware updates.

On the other hand, the manufacturer says that its antennas are compatible with its R658U router: http://www.tuoshi.net/images/uploadpic/202122410163358.jpg and well, the router firmware can be downloaded from: http://www.tuoshi.net/uploadfile/software/R658U-V3.6.zip

The R658U router seem to be executing in a fork of OpenWrt, probably (or not) with some non free drivers installed.

8

Seem to be that there is a driver for RTL8811AU and RTL8821AU:

But apparently not one take the time to included it as a package in OpenWrt. So, in theory, both antennas have a big probability to works with OpenWrt, but N519D should not be working directly, because we need to compiled the driver from the source.

9

if it's not in mainline kernel, that someone would be you.

10

if it's not in mainline kernel, that someone would be you.

Not necessarily me:

11

still not mainline, still useless, unless you want to maintain your own driver package, parallell to openwrt.

12

That's what someone else is apparently already doing. I just can't be 100% sure that it's going to work and that it's going to continue to work in the future.

13

Fine, just make sure you report any issues caused by the driver, radio or other, to the author.

14

This is how all things works on Linux in general, like you or not, the software here is without warranty and is made by particular persons in the upstream or the downstream. Kernel developers say the same thing about distributions (i.e. OpenWrt), whether they modify the kernel or when they maintain their own packages on the downstream. There is always someone higher up who thinks that you should not alter, modify or maintain something in parallel. If we are guided by that, only the Linux kernel should exists and nothing else.

15

@frollic It is MainLine and was MainLine when i opened this thread:

And here a branch that works as a client as that is what i need:

I think that you really need a little more positive mind!!! I hope now that this will be included officially at some point, but for now unofficially it works.