I own this router since about a year and a half and have to say that I love how its high end hardware performs. The major downside is that the software provided by Xiaomi does not justice to its potential, specially, the lack of VLAN support between others.
Since OpenWRT community is currently giving support to several others routers with same specs like Linksys EA8500, I was wondering if any dev could build or port a firmware for Xiaomi R3D. I'm ready to be a betatester if needed cause I know this router is not very popular due to its price. Thanks in advance you all.
While your device should be supportable, based on the mere hardware specs, it's generally not possible to port OpenWrt to a new device 'blindly', without having the actual hardware on the desk of the developer working on it - even less if there are no similar devices of the same vendor already supported. Many of the tasks needed require hands-on investigations, with a serial console attached and lots of careful treading until the device specifics and the structure of the existing OEM firmware (partitioning, bootloader quirks and recovery, device tree, where calibration data and MAC addresses are hiding, GPIO and LED configuration, firmware upgrade procedures, etc. pp.) could be determined.
I was counting on that. It occurred to me two possibilities, but both require someone to be ready and interested to work on it:
Disassembly the router and take whatever pictures are needed to determine the chipset present in the motherboard. I trust there could be already existing thecnical data available in the net or other fonts for that chipset. Buy the serial adapter required on my expense and allow the dev to connect and work remotely in my PC by using Teamviewer or other alike software.
Ship the router to the interested dev's address in order he can work phisically on it and then send it back to me after he complete the job (stable firmware). This option it is not of my liking because it requires a confidence vote apart from shipping costs I would have to afford.
R3D OEM firmware was also developed from OpenWrt, you can use its development version and fix it, change opkg repository to OpenWrt Snapshot, remove OEM LuCI and install OpenWrt LuCI
Many thanks for the info! I have joined the second QQ group posted in that forum but seems there is not aknowledge about it. All the links are also private. Could you share here the installation tutorial?
hey you
it is similar to R3P, https://openwrt.org/toh/xiaomi/xiaomi_r3p_pro
you see tut "Unlocking & Installing OpenWrt" (from 1 to 10), change OEM Dev ROM to R3D
Note: root pass on your account and not change
This is completely wrong. The HD version has a completely different SoC (Qualcomm based instead of Mediatek). Do not follow those instructions with your HD R3P, or you will brick your device.
This is the process to installing the developer version from Xiaomi official, you are install R3D ROM, do not R3P, I'm sure it works well, work is only replace OEM LuCI.
@Andrey102
I don't have R3D to test for you.
I only have R3 and R3P, I installed LuCI before OpenWrt support it.
You may not need LuCI and modify your device via SSH command line.
If you want, you can edit the /etc/opkg/distfeeds.conf and find LuCi for iQB8064 to install. I'm not sure. you can see more on http://downloads.openwrt.org.cn/
Given that I have SSH access to the router that's running its stock firmware (based on OpenWRT 12.09), can I extract information about the router from it directly and non-intrusively by running commands and providing the output to an OpenWRT developer?
After some research, I want to share here the latest news found about third party firmware development for this router. Seems there is an ongoing chinese firmware project called Pandorabox that is mostly based on LEDE/Openwrt. In principle, this team will support Qualcomm Atheros IPQ806x ARM chipset based routers, including Xiaomi R3D.
All the info posted till now in their forum is quite incomplete and confusing. They have also a fttp server for downloading lots of packages and resources but I haven't found nothing like a compiled firmware for the R3D.
I would be grateful if any dev here could check it and let us hear his impression. Thanks.
I have some experience with Pandora Box - it’s a highly modified version of Openwrt but uses closed source drivers so the Wi-fi and general performance is normally excellent. It uses a custom boot loader though and requires flashing over the xiaomi recovery. It makes it fairly difficult to flash back to stock or even openwrt unless you’ve backed up your recovery.
For Xiaomi MiWifi HD R3D, in end of 2020 years, we have:
Root with ssh, installed Transmission, and stable vork.
But. however very used to OpenWRT.
How can help promote OpenWRT for this router?
