Hey, thanks slh! I'll give those a try here sometime soon. I knew I had seen those somewhere but I've been too busy to watch all of the progress and stuff going on with the other ipq806x devices lately.
I also want to see about getting some of those thermal sensors working.
Be wary that TRENDnet has decided to release a v2.0R of the TEW-827DRU. All of my work and the information here centers around the TEW-827DRU v1.0R.
I don't know anything about the v2.0R yet, but I suspect it has completely different hardware inside and you should not try to install any of these images on the v2.0R.
The TRENDnet website says the v1.0R was discontinued on "11/2/2017", and I noticed the Amazon USA product page was changed to the v2.0R in April/May 2018.
While the chassis looks similar between the v1 and v2, an easy way to tell the difference between them is the number of USB ports. The v1.0R has two USB3 ports while the v2.0R only has one.
The first/original release (1.00b11) has a full firmware image set in it's FIT file, which includes all 13 of the NAND partitions except for the uboot environment part. The newer update releases only have a UBI image within them.
This means that if you want to restore the OEM image to your device, you must first flash the original release image (1.00b11) and then flash the latest updated image. This is necessary to restore a valid bootconfig before updating to the latest release.
Fortunately it looks like you can still download previous image files from TRENDnet's web page, even though they don't have direct links to them published.
A very quick and casual look at the TRENDnet OEM firmware (kernel 3.10.14) for the v2.0R suggests a Mediatek mt7621 SOC with mt7615 wlan (not supported by mt76) and much smaller spi-nor flash (probably 16 MB).
I just relized that somehow I missed adding the "append-metadata" make target for IMAGE/sysupgrade.tar. The result was the following error when trying to use sysupgrade to upgrade a device:
root@openwrt:/tmp# sysupgrade openwrt-ipq806x-trendnet_tew827dru-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin
Image metadata not found
Use sysupgrade -F to override this check when downgrading or flashing to vendor firmware
Image check 'fwtool_check_image' failed.
I will produce some new builds and patches which corrects the issue soon.
If you run into this issue, it's safe to use -F with sysupgrade.
It looks like TRENDnet published a new OEM firmware update version 1.04b01 last week on the 20th. I have updated the OEM info post. It doesn't sound very interesting. Just a single security update in dnsmasq.
I just published some new builds which fixes issues related to installing packages with opkg. Previously there were problems with the opkg feeds and my public package repos. These issues should now be fixed.
There was no changes to my patch sets. These issues were related to my build system and the package feeds listed in "/etc/opkg/".
I made a test build of the current master branch and 802.11/wifi LEDs do indeed work automatically.
There is a minor error with my patch set v13, just do a "git am --3way" to clear it up automatically. I'll fix it on the next release.
Be warned that I saw several errors and firmware crashes related to the ath10k driver on this build. All I had to do was "wifi down" / "wifi up" a few times to get it to crash.
Master recently moved to a 4.19~ based backports package - and at the same time also switched from ath10k to ath10k-ct, there are still some rough edges about that.
Testing ath10k instead of ath10k-ct is relatively easy, reverting to the older backports a little more involved.
Thanks for the info. I am somewhat aware of the history of the -ct driver/firmware and the current move to make it the default but I wasn't aware that had already happened. Unfortunately I don't have the time to follow everything on the mailing lists or what goes on here on the forums regarding all the other ipq806x devices, but I go and read up every once in awhile.
I recently got another tew827dru that I can use for testing, so that helps. I just wish I had the time to play with it more.
I have had three system crashes in the last two months on OpenWRT v18.06.1. If stability is a requirement, you might want to stick with the LEDE v17.01.06 release.
I've seen issues (as in spontaneous reboots, not just on ipq806x but also on lantiq) with flow-offloading enabled, while my nbg6817 is stable with it disabled (default).
I was going to tell you I had it disabled, but I looked and sure enough the kernel module is loaded and I must have included it in my image or something at some point. I don't actually have it configured though, so it's not even doing me any good.
There hasn't been a new OpenWRT release in several months now so there isn't anything to work on in regards to updates. You can use the opkg system to get the newest packages, and unlike many other devices this one has plenty of local storage space for the updates.
The last time I was playing around with the current master branch things were not stable due to some major changes so I don't recommend it.