By accident I picked up a used Netgear R6050. Normally I check devices with my phone when I buy them to see if they are on the compatability list, but my phone was dying and I was in a rush and somehow misread R6020 which IS supported with R6050.
I have been toying around with setting up a build environment for OpenWRT for a while now, to rebuild some firmwares for use with some of my devices with some customizations already in them. Then I ran across imagebuilder and figured that this might be easier and was going to do that instead.
But now I'm wondering about making an attempt with a build environment for the R6050.
There seems to be some information about it out there that indicates it might be a pretty easy port. For starters it's a 9 year old device so not a lot of sunk cost, and it has had some preliminary discovery work done:
that indicates there's a serial port, and a Ralink MediaTek chip. It seems similar to the Netgear R6020 where it has 3 antennas while the 6020 has 2. The R6020 seems to respond to nmrpflash so I'm assuming the 6050 would.
has an interesting statement that "R6020, R6080, R6120 have identical hardware" and I'm wondering if the R6050 might be in that family.
Wayback machine has some thumbnail pics here (originals are gone):.
And I've got a level-shifting serial adapter that I've used to debrick about a dozen routers now. The Netgear case seems very easy to open with the usual 6 screws.
I've read the info here:
and it does not seem that difficult. Complicated yes.
What do you folks think? Should I try this or just take it back for a refund?
I am going to try to port OpenWRT to this device. I built a machine with Debian 12 using these instructions:
And ran a test build that completed using these instructions:
but I have some questions about using the build system I was hoping someone could answer:
should I be doing a git checkout v23.05.0 or a git checkout v23.05 to get the current code that people are building snapshots from? I did a git checkout v23.05.2 and ran a build then got an error about python being recursive but in checking I ran across a post that this was fixed, and to build on head/23.05 I'm a newbie to the build system so what should I be checking out to build? The instructions seem to say "git checkout master" should I be just doing that or doing git checkout openwrt-23.05? More confusingly on the page of instructions it says "This step can be skipped you want to build bleeding edge images."
Menuconfig shows "imagebuilder" as a target that could be checked. Is that one way to get the Imagebuilder system? Would there be any value in having that?
If I do a build using "official build config" should the firmware image be binary-compatible to the firmware image on the download site? In other words, if I do a
I want to try building the R6020 image and then follow the instructions for modifying this for the R6050 by plugging in a serial cable and getting all of the goods from the factory firmware like the "how can I add support for a new device" instructions say to do.