Recently I bought one of the Mi 4A routers because it should be able to run recent versions of openwrt and was one of the few devices which actually supports Wifi 5 AC.
However after trying out the steps in the Wiki I found that it just bricks my device and I had to do tons of research to make my router work properly.
OpenwrtInvasion worked out of the box using docker and an Internet connection. Flashing the factory image worked too, but when I tried to flash the systemupgrade or the suggested snapshot from the Wiki it bricked my device and I had to search for a long time to fix it.
I got the Mi R4AC (Non Gigabit) v2 witht the following layout:
The overlay is a dead giveaway that this is not the regular version. After some digging I however found the following thread with an user who has the same device as me (same mtd output and his board has also a v1.3 stamp).
I also want to mention that I had to use a different version other than the 100m international version to debrick my device. Curiously I had to use the chinese firmware to debrick my device to be then able to root it and flash the snapshot on the router.
Is there a way to update the Wiki to let other people know about this? I've wasted 3 days in total and I feel like I am not alone with this.
Happy to update the wiki, but I can't link to a compiled build without sources as the work @WereCatf did should have been submitted as a PR to get this model added.
Very odd, I didn't find that site with the snapshots before.
But what I just realized is that this snapshot bricks the device and does NOT work like the firmware which @WereCatf uploaded here on the forums ...
This snapshot of the site you linked is the very same which is linked in the Wiki and if I flash it it bricks the device.
EDIT: Yeah you can easily identify the device externally by shining a flashlight (or opening that thing up). On the bottom of the board it will have "v1.3" as an imprint and also have a silver metal cooler on the chip. My device is the same like @rubydesign 's device, that's why I tried flashing the firmware from that thread in the first place lol
When I tried to flash it the first few times I kept close to the (flawed) wiki page and flashed the factory image from there first.
It worked. Worked as in it booted up and ran as expected - except for the AC support.
Then I tried to flash the snapshot and it bricked the device.
Now I have tried it again after flashing the snapshot factory image first (from your link) and then flashing the snapshot sys upgrade and it works. (except for the lack of GUI but that is expected of the snapshot version, right?)
So in summary: The snapshots work (factory and sysupgrade) BUT it bricks the device if you upload the factory image from the wiki page first (I think it might format some things wrong and make it incompatible with the snapshot).
To get it working you need to use the snapshot factory image (which isn't linked in the Wiki) and then use the snapshot factory image linked in the wiki
The wiki needs some serious updates or else many more people will wonder why the snapshots don't work and end up like me being completely confused and sad ...
Is there a way I can update the page and to upload files there?
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