im aware that openwrt on the r7000 isnt supported well at all, but i can see that the 2.4ghz band is partly supported meaning it supports 802.11g rates only. anyway, my connection is only 30mbps download and 5mbps upload so that would be no problem to me. however im wondering if settings like repeater mode/client mode would work as well on the 2.4ghz band? ive tried openwrt before and i like it but only used on a wired connection years ago. but with my current setup, i want to connect my router to my modem wirelessly through a repeater mode/client mode like i can with ddwrt and then connect ethernet to my pc. i just want to know if these features are available cause then i will do this. does anyone have solid experience with its partial support that could tell me if i could do this with openwrt? does this partial support have the ability to use repeater mode?
I had installed OpenWrt on R7000 about a couple of months ago. At default, LuCI didn't even show "Wireless" selection for configuration. I think you probably have to hunt for the driver package to get LuCI recognize it. Other than wifi, R7000 performed quite well. At the end I put FreshTomato on it because it was heavily crippled with 5GHz wifi for me.
i havent heard about driver packages. what do you mean by this and do you know where i could find such a thing?
I think the driver is "kmod-b43". And you also need one of the "wpad" packages to get wpasupplicant support. I always use the simple "wpad-mini" when I installed my rtl8192eu USB wifi adapter. (on a Pogoplug E02, not R7000).
i couldnt find kmod-b43 but i found this https://openwrt.org/packages/pkgdata/kmod-brcm-wl
does this look correct?
if you know of any other packages i would need, do let me know thanks for the help
also, i do notice on the r7000 page, it says the target is BCM53xx despite the chip being a BCM4709A0
im confused at this point lol
Did you see it in LuCI->System->Software after Update lists (Action)? I don't see it in 24.10.0 but kmod-b43.
There is no brcm-wl anymore, not that it really worked for the better part of the last decade anyways.
ok i got everything installed. i installed all the things you mentioned and other packages through a localhost/putty. all the packages successfully updated when checking in the software tab. but i still dont see a wifi tab. is there something else i need to do or something else to enable somewhere?. i dont see luci anywhere under network submenu
Did you do a reboot? I think a reboot is needed to get the wireless tab showed up if I remember correctly. One other thing is when I installed rtl8192eu (and rtl8188ftv), I needed to installed the corresponding firmware package. I don't know if there is a wifi firmware package for the broadcom on-board wifi. Hope someone who knows chime in.
yeah ive tried rebooting and still dont see a wireless tab. maybe i have to do something else but not quite sure what id need to do to have it show under 'Network'.
could you refer to me where that firmware package is for the device that you used so i can have a reference of what i need or if i already have it for my device. ty
My knowledge about how to use the two rtl81xx cards doesn't exist in one place that I can just point you to. I even had to learn how to build the Linux drivers myself to use them with my two Pogoplugs running Debian. Even that I couldn't use the cards with OpenWrt unless I took one more step learning how to build the "OpenWrt" driver packages. The relief came when Linux kernel 6.4 started supporting the cards and then OpenWrt 24.10.0 with kernel 6.6 supports them too. Sorry about not being able to answer your question directly. If you really want to get to the bottom of it, start with this Debian WiFi page and do a lot of reading/searching. I took the easy way out - put FreshTomato on R7000 and done with it.
Consider using another third party firmware like DDWRT or Fresh Tomato.
I have a couple of Broadcom routers and are very satisfied with DDWRT
I'm assuming you mean the Linksys R7000.
I hacked my R6900 years ago to make it think it was an R7000 and flashed it before I knew better.
It never worked; if it works now I've not read it.
i understand its not as simple but thank you for trying to help nonetheless, i think i will give up too and just flash FreshTomato. perhaps one day someone will post somewhere the correct packages and things needed for wireless to work on the R7000 because right now seems its a pretty hard task
thanks to everyone who tried to help.
for anyone else wondering what i did to try and get it to work:
i create a custom package using the official page (https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=24.10.0&target=bcm53xx%2Fgeneric&id=netgear_r7000) and i added these extra packages - ( luci-app-opkg uci-firewall wpad iwinfo kmod-b43 kmod-ssb librt wireless-tools luci-proto-relay pciutils kmod-usb-bcma kmod-brcmfmac kmod-brcmutil kmod-mac80211 kmod-lib-cordic ).
i could not get it to work. maybe someone could work off of this or stumble on this and figure out the missing pieces