Yes indeed would make nice mesh box, im also interested to see, the closest i am
currently testing LibreMesh on a RB912UAG-5HPnD (Basebox 5) with a ath5k Mini PCI-express card
LEDE will work on it,I have it running on Basebox 2.
Only thing is that LED GPIO is connected to buzzer so you can hear buzzer working when there is data going.
I havent got around to modifying LEDE to detect it because it is detected as RB912UAG-2HPnD and NAND and couple of GPIOs do not match.
Mikrotik really messed up by using same board identifier for two different boards.
QCA9882 will work for sure in Mini PCI-E slot,but you gotta modify LEDE board configuration for it to include ath10k driver and also calibration data must be extracted
I've had some success in supporting the RB922UAGS-5HPacD and the mANTBox 15s (which is actually a stripped-down version of the bare board with neither PCI nor USB sockets soldered fitted in an outdoor enclosure with a sector antenna). I guess the NetMetal devices will be quite similar.
You may want to take a look at my repository (see the rb-922uags-5hpacd and rb-921gs-5hpacd-r2 branches); booting the initramfs works fine but please bear in mind that flashing the sysupgrade image corrupts NAND blocks and renders the memory unusable as, afterwards, blocks report ECC read errors. It does not actually damage the hardware; the blocks can be recovered by erasing/formatting the NAND flash, but it's not trivial and requires patching the kernel's NAND driver.
I'll be opening a new forum thread to see if anybody can help me with the NAND issue...
Found the serial.
It seems my fancy new TTL level shifter is triggering around 5V, while the uart is 3V3
Using my trusty (but bulky) 3V3 shifter it works.