LinkStar H68K – RK3568 dual 2.5GbE, WiFi 6

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I saw it a few day ago in: https://www.seeedstudio.com/LinkStar-H68K-1432-p-5501.html

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mt7921 wouldn't be a bad wireless option at all, but I don't think it supports DBDC (well, only 2 antennas, so 'no'), meaning you'd better skip that for the cheaper wired-only model and add a decent OpenWrt support AP. It's a bit unclear how far towards 2.5 GBit/s the RK3568 can really go (I've seen measurements around 1.7+ GBit/s) - and even less how far into those value it might be able to do sqm/ cake, but it's certainly an interesting device.

I now this Router,
its a hinlink H68K.

I do not now what that "LINKSTAR" Label ist for. If you sell a Hinlink Router than call it Hinlink.
Now its more difficult to find the right information!
It looks like that seeed studio guys and girls are very special.

It is possible to buy the Router on:

-> this is for all people who do not have the "LINKSTAR" Brand on the Top of the box.

It looks like they take openwrt and write the code by themselves:

or
https://www.123pan.com/s/9a5rVv-VUwsH

I get the most information about this box from:

It would nice to now; are there any connections with the "official" openwrt community?

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cheaper alternative here - although I don't recommend it as openwrt support lacks

Hi, this is the marketing and partnership team from Seeed Studio. Sorry for puzzling you regarding this product.
Seeed Studio helps lots of start-ups scale up their business by distributing their products and helping them sell to the global market. This is just an example. We are actually the authorized exclusive reseller of HinLink-H68K in *worldwide markets, taking full responsibility for its sales and marketing, and are also responsible for the firmware update, document translation, technical support, and after-sales service of HinLink-H68K for English users in *worldwide markets.
Also, we agree on promoting this product with the name Linkstar to facilitate product promotion.
In addition, our 'LinkStar' is not exactly the same as the original version. All materials of 'Linkstar' have been upgraded to satisfy RoHS and other certification requirements, therefore, our 'Linkstar' is a better choice for customers outside of mainland China. (*Except for mainland China)
Any questions or advice about this product is welcome to leave your questions in the FAQ section on product page https://www.seeedstudio.com/LinkStar-H68K-1432-p-5501.html?queryID=aab9093e2d6a9c1036eee3f9c70aa6dc&objectID=5501&indexName=bazaar_retailer_products.

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https://www.hackster.io/so-ra/deploying-home-assistant-on-seeed-h68k-rerouter-with-openwrt-6b9813 we could say it is a quite nice device to support OpenWRT and Docker, allowing easy deployment of Home Assistant, running stable online 7x24 hours. Worth to have it!

Are you planning on upstreaming the used code to official openWRT repositories? Or will the OpenWRT fork that you have used for this device stay a proprietary release? will there be an offically allowed way, to flash a neutral OpenWRT code release to this device?

People in this forum are not interested, if they cannot get hand on the code and do own firmware deployments on the router.
Unfortunately no one in this community cares a lot about yet another chinese mini router being sold, just because it has to offer an older forked out proprietary managed derivat of OpenWRT.

Open it up, to win.

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I ordered the non-wifi version of the LinkStar H68K-0232 on the 5 of Dec. Still waiting on Seeed Studio to tell me who the shipping provider will be and when I will receive. Long time user of the Linksys WRT3200ACM. Still on David's last build for those who are familiar. The hardware specs for the LinkStar are impressive for the price-point. I look forward to checking out its capabilities and will share what I learn along the way. on this thread.

I completely agree with Pico, open it up from the LinkStar version of OpenWrt and make it up-gradable to OpenWrt proper, especially if you want to drive global adoption.

Please consider upstreaming the code to official OpenWRT, I have two rpi4 and a nanopi r4s, I want to replace the rpi4s with something more recent, but them are running a snapshot of OpenWRT with:

  • wireguard
  • unbound
  • kea-dhcp4
  • and some other utilities, tcpdump, drill

so when I will buy their replacements or add a new one, a requirement is compiling from OpenWRT repositories (snaphots are fine to me),

Thanks,

Gabrielo

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I want to get rid of this firmware. What is an option I can use to flash it instead? I keep trying the 22.03 but it keeps telling me to choose something that is compatible.

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with proper openwrt ?
currently, none.

ask the people providing the image, it isn't plain vanilla openwrt.

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I did they said that they would get a new git up next week. I was hoping to assign some VLAN's and do some networking with it. It just doesn't have that functionality to build those and tunnel like I had hoped.
Thanks for the reply Frolic.

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I think we Chinese users also deserve RoHS devices.

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@jennazhuxj... I have had the LinkStar H68K-0232 running as my main router since Dec 30. Excellent throughput, low latency, and it was highly configurable. It's running on your custom build of OpenWrt. My concern is there are no updates to the existing build basd on 21.02.1 and there are no master or snapshot images available, through Seed Studio or with standard OpenWrt. No repo yet available for updates and would like to know if you intend to share the code back upstream with the OpenWrt community?

Will this get added to openwrt supported devices ?

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@jennazhuxj - Asking again. Is the custom build being updated by Seeed Studio or when will a new git repo for updates be available?

Otherwise is anyone else in the OpenWRT community working on this one? The LinkStar H68K-0232 is the non-wireless version and is similar to some of the Nano-Pi RS5, Rock-Pi, Orange-Pi devices out there. The device is advertised as supporting OpenWrt, but it is not true. Architecture is based on the Rockchip RK3568 and the the aarch64_generic target / armv8 subtarget and is not yet supported by true OpenWrt. It appears to be based on the ImmortalWRT variant. I can say it is running very stable for me since 30 of Dec. I would take compiling an image on myself, but this is just not in my skill-set. Not getting any love from Seeed Studio on support or any word on updates for this this. If anyone is working on this or if it's on the way, it would sure be good to know. Thank you in advance.

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I just got mine but needed to borrow a Windows box to flash the OS onto eMMC. (It booted fine from the microSD card, but would rather not boot off microSD.) Unfortunately I had less luck than BigRon getting the flashed image to boot, but am really looking forward to getting this multi-gigabit router in place with OpenWRT so I can do the routing I want to do, in a small form factor without a thousand bucks of kit. I like the Seeed Studio folks (and have even been to their office in Shenzhen) and they've been part of the local maker scene over there for a while... But I do hope they open source their open source OS. :wink:

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Today Seeed announced via their email newsletter that they've released an openwrt branch with their linkstar changes on the master branch. They say it's v22.03, but I only see their changes on the master branch, not on the 22.03 branch. It appears from their announcement that they may be planning to get their changes into the actual openwrt codebase.

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I attempted to build the image from their master branch, and the compile completed fine, but the device doesn't boot with the resulting image flashed onto a TF card.

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