A lot of devices in the Table of Hardware have an outdated / non-existing availability status. In order to keep the ToH usefull for users searching for a new device to buy, the availability data should be updated regularly.
Update availability of a device by clicking on “View/Edit data” in the last column, then follow the instructions on the dataentry page
If you can buy a device in 2020 -> Available 2020
If you can not buy a device in 2020 -> Discontinued (bonus points if you know in which year)
Do not enter Available < year in the past >. We have 2020 and we want to know if this device can be bought today, i.e. in 2020. We do not want to know when the device first was commercially available.
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The OpenWrt wiki and Table of Hardware are from the community and for the community.
The more the community contributes, the better for the community.
Do you see any device in https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_admin_available that you know has been discontinued by the OEM? Great, then you can help to keep our data up to date! See above how you can contribute directly.
If you do not have an account for the OpenWrt wiki (and you don't want to create one only for this task), just let me know your input here in this topic, and I will update the data accordingly.
There are sites that track availability and price of products. This is a Swedish example, but I think it will be clear enough:
Linksys: WRT1900AC: https://www.prisjakt.nu/produkt.php?p=2463329
I think it is quite safe to assume that this site has assigned this product an ID of 2463329, and we can query that page. It has the text "Inga butiker hittades för denna produkt" meaning nobody is selling it.
Linksys Archer C7 AC750: https://www.prisjakt.nu/produkt.php?p=1804875
So I think this device has ID 1804875. There are some key indications on the site: "Ny (30)" means there are 30 stores selling it brand new.
I think this can be mostly-automated. Perhaps there are 50-100 devices that are relevant and available today (summer 2022). For each of them we need:
a static url
a "positive" trigger (like "Ny (*)") that we are looking for
We can find a few similar sites in different countries that seem to work ok for our purposes.
A few times per year we run a script checking all sites/models, and compare the result with last run. If it is no longer positive, we update the Wiki accordingly.
As a side effect, in the long run, we could end up with links to places that sell the devices as well. All this does not need to end up on the ToH itself.
The "hard" work is to add new links to new devices.
There are exactly 100 devices in Available 2021 + Available 2022 as I am writing this. Those are a good start.
I just noticed that the table export isn't up to date (i.e. missing 24.10.0 as current release, unsure of which devices are impacted). Is there somewhere to notify this?
Don't put too much weight into that table, maintenance for the info "available" or "no available" for ~2700 devices is very hard to maintain and it's doubtful that anyone is really trying to keep that up to date at the moment. Relying on that information alone will likely make you miss out on many recent -good- devices that are not listed there for various reasons.
IMHO: it's even the wrong approach to start searching. I'd rather suggest two different approaches (depending on local device availability):
either checking the local markets for 'available' devices within your budget and then cross-checking that with their support status
xor selecting a target with the features you're after (e.g. filogic, ipq807x, mt7621, …) and then choosing the 'perfect' device from that list
I'd say it's impossible, with vendors reusing model names on ever changing hardware and shops not caring to update their database when this happens.
I can understand the wish to include this information, but IMHO it would be better to drop it. All manually maintained dynamic fields will suffer from rot. And this field is even impossible to get right in the first place.
The number of OpenWrt users per device would by a much more interresting data point. This would also indicate availability, although a popular devices obviously will go out of production too. Still, if a device was popular then it is likely available second hand for a long time.
We could even imagine trending graphs which could help decide if a device is becoming more popular and therefore more likely avaiable.
The main reasons I believe such data would be useful is that updates could be automated (thinking something like Debian's "popcon", but for devices). And the fact that popular devices are, and alwasy will be, better supported than other devices. They are continiously tested. And they are usually popular because they are well supported in the first place. These factors are the most important for new users.
You can get some feeling of device popularity by reading these forums, but collecting the info and making sure it isn't stale is hard. Having automatic opt-in popcon would make it a lot easier.
Hmm, thinking of it - maybe these data are already semi-available based on download statistic? Still, I think it would be better to have a periodically updated count with a lot higher frequency than the typical end user image download.
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