If you want to have a diy router, I suggest you buy a openwrt router.
Firstly, you can find “Table fo Hardware’. this is the main table of hardware, listing all devices that are suppprted by Openwrt.
I had bought a GL.inet router, and its hardware was the same as the TL-WR720N, so I updated the router with WR720N’s firmware.
There are some different versions firmares. Binary releases and historic releases are relatively stable, but it may not have some new features. Development Snapshots was the newest firmware.
If you are not a developer, I suggest to use a stable firmware. Some softwares are incompatible across multiple releases. Development snapshots are updated fast, so we have to update the newest firmware when we want to install some sofrwares. However, I can lost some important configuration files if the firmware is updated.
I can download my router’s firmware. there are usually 2 kind of firmware: sysupgrade and factory. Some configuration files (network, firewall, etc. ) will be reserved if the router is updated with sysupgrade firmware. All the configuration files will be cleared with factory firmware.
Let’s update firmware:
1 | wget https://downloads.openwrt.org/chaos_calmer/15.05/ar71xx/generic/xxx.bin |
If you download a sydupgrade version:
1 | sysupgrade -v xxx.bin |
Also, if you download factory version:
1 | mtd -r write xxx.bin firmware |