OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: WRT54GL and 64MB RAM upgrade: [partial] success.

The content of this topic has been archived between 11 Apr 2018 and 24 Apr 2018. Unfortunately there are posts – most likely complete pages – missing.

is there a difference in terms of serial number CL7B1... between WRT54GL-EU and WRT54GL-D?

kikiconnected wrote:

Hello Guys!!


After spending lots of hours of inspecting Linksys borads I could tell you why in some cases 64mod fails!!!
I had supplier for Linksys wrt54gl and made almost 50 mods without any problems.
I changed supplier and took cheaper Linksyses. I f****d almost 8 boards before I realise that it must be something wrong with this new boards. Because I live in this f*****g country they sold me
LINKSYS WRT54GL-EU WHICH IS CRAP AND COULD NOT BE MODED!!!
BEFORE THAT I HAD LINKSYS WRT54GL-DE AND WAS BETTER AND COULD BE MODED.
BOARD IS DIFFERENT AND RAM CHIP IS DIFFERENT!!

CONCLUSION?

IF ON YOUR RAM CHIP IS WRITTEN FTP THAN YOU WILL KILL YOUR ROUTER
IF ON YOUR RAM CHIP IS WRITTEN ETP THAN YOUR ROUTER COULD BE MODED

I ALSO REALISED THAT WHEN I SOLDERED NANYAS CHIP TO WRT54GL-EU ROUTER WORKED FOR
ALMOST 30MIN -1 HOUR BUT BROADCOM CPU WAS MAKING HIGH FREQUENCY NOISES.

IF YOU THINK THAT I AM WRONG POST HERE PLEASE!!

On the contrary. I think you are right.
I have 2 WRT54GL1.1 and have purchased the chips required for the 64MB upgrade but haven't been able to get them to work with the new chips.
I posted on this forum in the past seeking advice, but haven't to this day been able to revive them.

As a test I put back the original chips and they worked, so I tried again but failed.
Since then I've almost given up on them. Your message got me looking for the old chips again, and sure enough they are FTP.
Please post a message if you ever get these routers working with 64MB. (Maybe a different replacement chip?)

Thanks.

FYI, I have successfully put in 64MB RAM and a few days later (had to order from Digikey) did the 16MB Intel flash upgrade.  Both went very smoothly.  I have a GL 1.1 (Canadian model, with FTP on the original RAM chip).

Everything worked the first time (although jffs did take a bit of time with resets and such, but it did go eventually).  Maybe I was being impatient.

xciton wrote:

FYI, I have successfully put in 64MB RAM and a few days later (had to order from Digikey) did the 16MB Intel flash upgrade.  Both went very smoothly.  I have a GL 1.1 (Canadian model, with FTP on the original RAM chip).

Everything worked the first time (although jffs did take a bit of time with resets and such, but it did go eventually).  Maybe I was being impatient.

Glad for you. My chips were from Digikey as well.
I guess I'm back to square one then.

I modified as well my WRT54GLv1.1 D with original FTP RAM chips with Nanya NT5DS32M16BS-5T 64MB and it works fine.

Hello Guys!!

What I wrote is true for some models with ftp chips.
But what I wanted to say is IF YOU ARE UNSURE WHICH MODEL IS BEST FOR RAM UPGRADE
BUY LINKSYS WRT54GL-DE AND YOU WONT BE SORRY!!
Now I finally got some German Linksyses and I upgraded 20 without any problem at all.
They all have etp chips and these smaller dc adapters.

FOR NOW I COULD CONFIRM THAT LINKSYS MADE FOR FOLLOWING COUNTRIES COULD BE UPGRADED:

-Italy
-Austria
-Germany
-England

Next time I will post some pictures of 4 different boards of Linksyses wrt54gl so you could see the difference.


Cheers,
KIKI

kikiconnected wrote:

Hello Guys!!

What I wrote is true for some models with ftp chips.
But what I wanted to say is IF YOU ARE UNSURE WHICH MODEL IS BEST FOR RAM UPGRADE
BUY LINKSYS WRT54GL-DE AND YOU WONT BE SORRY!!
Now I finally got some German Linksyses and I upgraded 20 without any problem at all.
They all have etp chips and these smaller dc adapters.

FOR NOW I COULD CONFIRM THAT LINKSYS MADE FOR FOLLOWING COUNTRIES COULD BE UPGRADED:

-Italy
-Austria
-Germany
-England

Next time I will post some pictures of 4 different boards of Linksyses wrt54gl so you could see the difference.

Mine both have just WRT54GL v1.1 as the Model. No country designations.

Kenny

I cant seem to find an exact match to the 16mb flash chip used in one of the photos here, digikey doesnt stock it..

Will models with faster access times work OK?

TE28F128J3D75
TE28F128P33B85
TE28F128P33T85

??

(Last edited by Inssomniak on 2 Aug 2008, 23:57)

I have a decent Weller soldering iron, but I know I'm better with software than with soldering.

Has anyone with experience doing these upgrades considered doing this as a service for a reasonable fee?  Either by accepting and returning given hardware (router and/or chips), or buying and reselling with upgrades?

There's even some built-in economies of scale.  As it seems the only way of obtaining the proper RAM upgrades is to unsolder them from a SODIMM, that's 4 or 8 chips - enough for as many routers - off of one SODIMM purchase.

I'm also interested in upgrading the flash from 4 MB to 8 MB - or just adding on an MMC/SD reader.  (This I'd probably have some luck trying myself.)

I think OpenWrt and the other open firmwares are great for extending this hardware.  However, I'm finding myself approaching the limits of the hardware in terms of storage and RAM.

Sure, I could just buy something else, but what?  I could use a mini PC as the router, but that requires more power, components, etc., and then I still don't have an integrated switch and WAP.  I know there are a lot of other devices out there with more flash, RAM, and even built-in USB, etc., but which ones are well supported by OpenWRT, and have the same decent dual/diversity antennas and reception as found on the trusted WRT54G* series?  The TableOfHardware wiki page has gotten rather large, but most are unsupported/untested/WIP.  Others are no longer on the market, or very difficult to get a hold of.

ziesemer wrote:

I have a decent Weller soldering iron, but I know I'm better with software than with soldering.

Has anyone with experience doing these upgrades considered doing this as a service for a reasonable fee?  Either by accepting and returning given hardware (router and/or chips), or buying and reselling with upgrades?

There's even some built-in economies of scale.  As it seems the only way of obtaining the proper RAM upgrades is to unsolder them from a SODIMM, that's 4 or 8 chips - enough for as many routers - off of one SODIMM purchase.

I'm also interested in upgrading the flash from 4 MB to 8 MB - or just adding on an MMC/SD reader.  (This I'd probably have some luck trying myself.)

I think OpenWrt and the other open firmwares are great for extending this hardware.  However, I'm finding myself approaching the limits of the hardware in terms of storage and RAM.

Sure, I could just buy something else, but what?  I could use a mini PC as the router, but that requires more power, components, etc., and then I still don't have an integrated switch and WAP.  I know there are a lot of other devices out there with more flash, RAM, and even built-in USB, etc., but which ones are well supported by OpenWRT, and have the same decent dual/diversity antennas and reception as found on the trusted WRT54G* series?  The TableOfHardware wiki page has gotten rather large, but most are unsupported/untested/WIP.  Others are no longer on the market, or very difficult to get a hold of.

Take a look at Foxboard (www.acmesystems.it).
It's not supported by the official OpenWRT  at the moment, I'm working with a "fork" of Openwrt and it works like a charm! (usb hdd connected, wifi pen,etc...).
Maybe one day it will be supported by the official Openwrt as well smile

boing, ruined my wrt54gl big_smile when unsoldering the hynix chip the silver plates on the wrt-board felt off Oo! but i did not use bruteforce - stupid thing. so it was damaged before i could solder in the new ram chip. thats life.

Hi guys here is my situation, i have a Linksys WRT54GL-EU 1.1 FTP chipset bought in Italy. I'd like to upgrade it with 64MB of ram and i have 8 NT5DS32M16BS-6K chipset from NT512D64SH8B0GN RAM. Can i upgrade my router, how can i define nvram values? from this link http://wl500g.dyndns.org/sdram.html ?
My chipset Datasheet http://www.datasheet4u.com/html/N/T/5/N … y.pdf.html

Help is appreciated.Thank you very much.

(Last edited by eikaf on 14 Jun 2009, 12:43)

Hi peeps.

I know this thread is pretty dead, but I was hoping I could get two questions answered:

1) Everyone in this thread was talking about modding the early WRT54GL to 64MB RAM, but I was wondering if you can mod a WRT54GS v2 to 64MB RAM? This model has 32MB RAM stock, and uses one RAM chip of 66 pins. The type of RAM is Hynix HY5DU561622DT-J. I found a datasheet here:
http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datashe … eehy7y.pdf

This RAM is rated as 256Mbit (16M x 16), which satisfies that it is 16 bit, not 8bit. Rated as -J it is 133MHz@CL2, 166MHz@CL2.5, and DDR333 (2.5-3-3) (CL-tRCD-tRP). I note that the Row Address is A0 - A12, and Column Address is A0-A8.
It seems that this chip can be upgraded, but I want to make sure from someone else who can verify my information.

I'd like to upgrade this chip to a 512Mbit chip which is also 16 bit. There have been some suggestions already as to which chips to try, and have had success. Before I remove my RAM chip, I'd like to make sure it is possible for me to go forward.

----------------------

2) I'm confused about the no contact pins, or the extra wires. It seems this is specific to the Linksys router board, not to the chip? I assume that all pins are soldered down. Is this just a straight swap chip-for-chip and then change settings in NVRAM, or do I need to worry about re-wiring pins and such?

Fredvs79 wrote:

Hi peeps.

1)  the early WRT54GL to 64MB RAM, but I was wondering if you can mod a WRT54GS v2 to 64MB RAM?
2) I'm confused about the no contact pins, or the extra wires...  Is this just a straight swap chip-for-chip and then change settings in NVRAM, or do I need to worry about re-wiring pins and such?

1.) I don't know whether you can upgrade the GSv2...I assume its fairly difficult. But you can still buy the GL which is easy to modify.
2.)no extra wires, just swap chips...

But be carefull, you need experience in desoldering /soldering the chips...smd rework set up.

As a side note: I upgraded  my GL's Flash to 16MB as well...just chip swap

Thank you for posting a response, I was afraid this thread was dead. However it doesn't really answer my question. I have a WRT54GS v2, and I would rather not buy a 5 year old WRT54GL just to mod it to get more RAM... My current router is just fine, and I was thinking about extending its life a little by upping the RAM. But thank you for sharing the info on the Flash upgrade, I'm sure that is useful somehow for increasing the JFFS2 file system size. I guess since most firmwares only use 4mb, you now have 12mb of free space for additional software?

One more thing...
The WRT54GL v1 is basically just a reissue of the WRT54G v4 without VXworks, but with Linux. The WRT54G v4 took a dive in hardware to lower costs for main-stream consumers, while the WRT54GL maintained that hardware (RAM, Flash) for back-end development amongst programmers and enthusiasts. The WRT54GS v2 is basically a WRT54G v2.2 with speedbooster software, and additional RAM and Flash to the WRT54G. The wiki here: http://nuwiki.openwrt.org/oldwiki/OpenW … AM_upgrade says that you can do this upgrade on WRT54G v2-v4. But no mention of WRT54GS. I guess most people are happy with their WRT54GS and don't bother to try to push it further.

(Last edited by Fredvs79 on 9 Sep 2009, 01:21)

The discussion might have continued from here.