Hi,

I wonder if anyone can help with getting OpenWRT running on the Talktalk branded Huawei HG635, I'm not very good with the development stuff but I reckon it should be relatively easy to get OpenWRT running on this hardware since Huawei have made some open source file downloads available for it here:

http://consumer.huawei.com/en/support/d … m?id=28981

It has also been opened up by some people here http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac … 378/review

with the hardware and chipsets listed as:

I'll be grateful with any help how this can be done and I'm sure a lot of people in the UK would be glad to have an image for this nifty piece of kit which can be found in many Talktalk serviced homes in the UK.

- ADSL2+/VDSL drivers for Broadcom devices are closed source - there is no support for that part of the hardware
- Wireless BCM4360 is not supported by Linux because Broadcom does not release open drivers (see several other threads regarding routers with that radio)

I guess, since there's support for hg655 and bcm63168, hg635 should now be easy to add on the supported hardware list. I have one and I would be more than happy to help with it. I'm not new to linux, but very new to openwrt. From where can I start helping with? I need just the ethernet and the wireless part. Although more then happy to contribute to the xdsl one as well.

Thanks!

AFAIK, this router uses a NAND flash chip. For the moment there isn't any bcm63168 with a NAND chip supported. Spite latest Linux kernels (>4.1) has support for bcm63xx NAND controllers, the devs still didn't adopted any approach to deal with these NAND chips for making working firmwares in NAND flashes.

Looks like the main problem is the bootloader, that lives in the root partition, but openwrt can't include binaries in it's code, or at least the idea is to avoid it.

BTW if you want to help for eventual support, you could document the device, guessing things like the serial port pinout, good photos of the board, bootlogs, firmware dumps, oem sourcecode, and so on.

Regards.
dani

Hey Dani,
I'm not an expert, but I can do that in the next days. What I can assume until now is that the bootloader is CFE, because if you hold the reset button for ~20 sec while booting, you'll get a nice web page on http://192.168.1.1 prompting for an image. I will post here images of the board and the bootlog, once the usb converter would arrive. First time for me in this experience

Any help on how to guess pinout, get firmware dump and so on would be appreciated.

Fyi. I downloaded the source code mentioned on the first post (the onyl one available), and tried to make it compile. It is missing a lot of of files and there are traces of the dev that coded it (references on home directory in Makefiles/config files). Although it is based on linux, I don't know how much it has been modified. The kernel is 2.6.30 and there are the gpio drivers included. Although the board says 963168, in the kernel it is referred to as 963268 (I suspect drivers are the same for both boards?!).

Thanks!
Dario

Now I can guess where the console pins are, but I don't have a solderer. Any suggestion on how to get a console connection in this case?

I bought a USB adapter with free wires. Should help in doing this. Thanks!

Dario

Hi Dario, nice pics. Without soldering could be possible, examples on other boards
http://i.imgur.com/qV3Hv2m.jpg
http://i.snag.gy/0QCGr.jpg
But I don't recommend it at least for a permanent access to the serial console, but might be only for testing purposes.

With your permission I'll use your pics for adding a wiki entry for the router, if you don't have any inconvenience.

Regards.

Of course you can use those pics
I'll try to console connection asap. Thanks for the suggestions!

Dario

Hey. Is it possible to do this router on OpenVRT in the future or is it not subject to a new firmware? And place him with trash?