I have a router from Costco as referenced in the subject. From what I have read, it is the same as the R6300v2, but limited by software. Right now I am running DD-WRT on it and it works fine, but I want to remove a bunch of stuff that I'll never use, so OpenWrt seems like the right selection. DD-WRT has a separate firmware for AC1450 and R6300v2 and they say they settings are actually different.
Does anyone have any experience with the AC1450, or suggestions? (Other than if it ain't broke, don't fix it!)
I actually want to set it up as a dumb AP, without DHCP or firewall. I also want to disable the USB ports. I want to control everything from the master router, and use this one where the WiFi signal is very weak, as a secondary AP.
Even if it were supported[0], you do realize that its WLAN cards are not[1]?
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[0] the answer to that question would be found at https://openwrt.org/toh/start
[1] beyond very basic support via b43, which is limited to 802.11g (54 MBit/s at most) and doesn't provide support for 802.11n or 802.11ac data rates
Yes, @slh, I've been reading some more and now I see that dd-wrt has an agreement to distribute proprietary binaries for Broadcom chips. That also confirms what @mk24 says, stock is the best for Broadcom chips, since there isn't an open source alternative.
I also checked into customizing dd-wrt, which might be the best choice for me. I'll use the proprietary blobs from the stock firmware, but remove all the unused code from the router. I didn't realize that OpenWrt and dd-wrt were so close that .ipks are many times swapable (at least according to them).
I love the clean look of the bootstrap theme in OpenWrt, and I also like the philosophy of the interface, which is more of a Linux GUI. It would be ideal if I could build a "FrankenWRT" with all the stuff I love from OpenWrt and the Broadcom blobs. I'm just getting started with customization, so I don't know enough to get there.
That is incorrect, using a similar source format doesn't imply binary compatibility (and OpenWrt *.ipk from 15.05.x isn't compatible with 17.01.x already, neither would be an OpenSuSE RPM in a Fedora system), aside from very simple leaf packages (basically shell scripts only, and even those have different expectations about the host system) it will blow up spectacularly.
Thanks for the clarification. Their development wiki must have outdated parts, or perhaps by "cross-compatible" they mean that one could take the source from one platform to the other and build it to use it.
Even that might be a stretch, though, so it's probably outdated stuff.