I have a TP-Link 702N in a drawer. No ext usb. Now that this is not supported by OpenWRT what can I do with it, if anything?
I'd just like to be able to monitor where bandwidth is going
edit: Ah! Should be 2mb/16mb! Thanks for pointing that out /thedukesd/
I would bin it. But you can compile an image from scratch and make it fit. Strip out anything you can. It will be unsupported but maybe you can use it as network ad-blocker or something. Personally I would recycle it and use $10 arm based sbc for ad-blocking. It might even use less power than the old router.
https://wikidevi.wi-cat.ru/TP-LINK_TL-WR702N_v1.0
https://wikidevi.wi-cat.ru/TP-LINK_TL-WR702N_v1.2
2/16 not 4/32
https://oldwiki.archive.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr702n
Is there a typo in the name (720/703)? Or you modded it to 4/32?
Assuming it's a typo in the name: you can probably still self compile 19.07 (ar71xxx not ath79) and remove luci/other things and it will probably still run. (I'm more worried about the ram than the flash size to be honest, you can probably chop down stuff to get it in 4MB of flash even with weird partitions but the ram is a bit of a hard limit to be honest).
Great to hear something's possible.
What if I straight route everything but also push monitoring to some external logger? Something like ipref?
That way I can use it as an access point but when something starts sucking the bandwidth I can start up a server somewhere to receive the logging and see which device is using up all the bandwidth.
I believe VXworks has ipref too.
Where to start with this?
IMO, the only thing to do is make a copy of original flash and put the data on a 8 MB chip, then swap them out on the board
this requires an SPI programmer and soldering experience
depending on the board, an alternative bootloader may be available
with pepe2k's uboot-mod or forks of it
or if you are friendly with the C language, you can use their forks to make your own bootloader
Are we talking about TL-WR702N or TL-WR720N?