ZTE MF283+ is a dual-antenna LTE category 4 router, based on Ralink RT3352 SoC, and built-in ZTE P685M PCIe MiniCard LTE modem. Hardware highlighs: - CPU: MIPS24KEc at 400MHz, - RAM: 64MB DDR2, - Flash: 16MB SPI, - Ethernet: 4 10/100M port switch with VLAN support, - Wireless: Dual-stream 802.11n (RT2860), with two internal antennas, - WWAN: Built-in ZTE P685M modem, with two internal antennas and two switching SMA connectors for external antennas, - FXS: Single ATA, with two connectors marked PHONE1 and PHONE2, internally wired in parallel by 0-Ohm resistors, handled entirely by internal WWAN modem. - USB: internal miniPCIe slot for modem, unpopulated USB A connector on PCB. - SIM slot for the WWAN modem. - UART connector for the console (unpopulated) at 3.3V, pinout: 1: VCC, 2: TXD, 3: RXD, 4: GND, settings: 57600-8-N-1. - LEDs: Power (fixed), WLAN, WWAN (RGB), phone (bicolor, controlled by modem), Signal, 4 link/act LEDs for LAN1-4. - Buttons: WPS, reset. Installation: As the modem is, for most of the time, provided by carriers, there is no possibility to flash through web interface, only built-in FOTA update and TFTP recovery are supported. There are two installation methods: (1) Using serial console and initramfs-kernel - recommended, as it allows you to back up original firmware, or (2) Using TFTP recovery - does not require disassembly. (1) Using serial console: To install OpenWrt, one needs to disassemble the router and flash it via TFTP by using serial console: - Locate unpopulated 4-pin header on the top of the board, near buttons. - Connect UART adapter to the connector. Use 3.3V voltage level only, omit VCC connection. Pin 1 (VCC) is marked by square pad. - Put your initramfs-kernel image in TFTP server directory. - Power-up the device. - Press "1" to load initramfs image to RAM. - Enter IP address chosen for the device (defaults to 192.168.0.1). - Enter TFTP server IP address (defaults to 192.168.0.22). - Enter image filename as put inside TFTP server - something short, like firmware.bin is recommended. - Hit enter to load the image. U-boot will store above values in persistent environment for next installation. - If you ever might want to return to vendor firmware, BACK UP CONTENTS OF YOUR FLASH NOW. For this router, commonly used by mobile networks, plain vendor images are not officially available. To do so, copy contents of each /dev/mtd[0-3], "firmware" - mtd3 being the most important, and copy them over network to your PC. But in case anything goes wrong, PLEASE do back up ALL OF THEM. - From under OpenWrt just booted, load the sysupgrade image to tmpfs, and execute sysupgrade. (2) Using TFTP recovery - Set your host IP to 192.168.0.22 - for example using: sudo ip addr add 192.168.0.22/24 dev <interface> - Set up a TFTP server on your machine - Put the sysupgrade image in TFTP server root named as 'root_uImage' (no quotes), for example using tftpd: cp openwrt-ramips-rt305x-zte_mf283plus-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin /srv/tftp/root_uImage - Power on the router holding BOTH Reset and WPS buttons held for around 5 seconds, until after WWAN and Signal LEDs blink. - Wait for OpenWrt to start booting up, this should take around a minute. Return to original firmware: Here, again there are two possibilities are possible, just like for installation: (1) Using initramfs-kernel image and serial console (2) Using TFTP recovery (1) Using initramfs-kernel image and serial console - Boot OpenWrt initramfs-kernel image via TFTP the same as for installation. - Copy over the backed up "firmware.bin" image of "mtd3" to /tmp/ - Use "mtd write /tmp/firmware.bin /dev/mtd3", where firmware.bin is your backup taken before OpenWrt installation, and /dev/mtd3 is the "firmware" partition. (2) Using TFTP recovery - Follow the same steps as for installation, but replacing 'root_uImage' with firmware backup you took during installation, or by vendor firmware obtained elsewhere. A few quirks of the device, noted from my instance: - Wired and wireless MAC addresses written in flash are the same, despite being in separate locations. - Power LED is hardwired to 3.3V, so there is no status LED per se, and WLAN LED is controlled by WLAN driver, so I had to hijack 3G/4G LED for status - original firmware also does this in bootup. - FXS subsystem and its LED is controlled by the modem, so it work independently of OpenWrt. Tested to work even before OpenWrt booted. I managed to open up modem's shell via ADB, and found from its kernel logs, that FXS and its LED is indeed controlled by modem. - While finding LEDs, I had no GPL source drop from ZTE, so I had to probe for each and every one of them manually, so this might not be complete - it looks like bicolor LED is used for FXS, possibly to support dual-ported variant in other device sharing the PCB. - Flash performance is very low, despite enabling 50MHz clock and fast read command, due to using 4k sectors throughout the target. I decided to keep it at the moment, to avoid breaking existing devices - I identified one potentially affected, should this be limited to under 4MB of Flash. The difference between sysupgrade durations is whopping 3min vs 8min, so this is worth pursuing. In vendor firmware, WWAN LED behaviour is as follows, citing the manual: - red - no registration, - green - 3G, - blue - 4G. Blinking indicates activity, so netdev trigger mapped from wwan0 to blue:wwan looks reasonable at the moment, for full replacement, a script similar to "rssileds" would need to be developed. Behaviour of "Signal LED" in vendor firmware is as follows: - Off - no signal, - Blinking - poor coverage - Solid - good coverage. A few more details on the built-in LTE modem: Modem is not fully supported upstream in Linux - only two CDC ports (DIAG and one for QMI) probe. I sent patches upstream to add required device IDs for full support. The mapping of USB functions is as follows: - CDC (QCDM) - dedicated to comunicating with proprietary Qualcomm tools. - CDC (PCUI) - not supported by upstream 'option' driver yet. Patch submitted upstream. - CDC (Modem) - Exactly the same as above - QMI - A patch is sent upstream to add device ID, with that in place, uqmi did connect successfully, once I selected correct PDP context type for my SIM (IPv4-only, not default IPv4v6). - ADB - self-explanatory, one can access the ADB shell with a device ID added to 51-android.rules like so: SUBSYSTEM!="usb", GOTO="android_usb_rules_end" LABEL="android_usb_rules_begin" SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="19d2", ATTR{idProduct}=="1275", ENV{adb_user}="yes" ENV{adb_user}=="yes", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev", TAG+="uaccess" LABEL="android_usb_rules_end" While not really needed in OpenWrt, it might come useful if one decides to move the modem to their PC to hack it further, insides seem to be pretty interesting. ADB also works well from within OpenWrt without that. O course it isn't needed for normal operation, so I left it out of DEVICE_PACKAGES. Signed-off-by: Lech Perczak <lech.perczak@gmail.com> [remove kmod-usb-ledtrig-usbport, take merged upstream patches] Signed-off-by: Adrian Schmutzler <freifunk@adrianschmutzler.de> (cherry picked from commit 59d065c9f81c4d1a89464d071134a50529449f34) [Manually remove no longer needed patches for modem] Signed-off-by: Lech Perczak <lech.perczak@gmail.com>
OpenWrt Project is a Linux operating system targeting embedded devices. Instead of trying to create a single, static firmware, OpenWrt provides a fully writable filesystem with package management. This frees you from the application selection and configuration provided by the vendor and allows you to customize the device through the use of packages to suit any application. For developers, OpenWrt is the framework to build an application without having to build a complete firmware around it; for users this means the ability for full customization, to use the device in ways never envisioned.
Sunshine!
Development
To build your own firmware you need a GNU/Linux, BSD or MacOSX system (case sensitive filesystem required). Cygwin is unsupported because of the lack of a case sensitive file system.
Requirements
You need the following tools to compile OpenWrt, the package names vary between distributions. A complete list with distribution specific packages is found in the Build System Setup documentation.
gcc binutils bzip2 flex python3 perl make find grep diff unzip gawk getopt
subversion libz-dev libc-dev rsync which
Quickstart
-
Run
./scripts/feeds update -a
to obtain all the latest package definitions defined in feeds.conf / feeds.conf.default -
Run
./scripts/feeds install -a
to install symlinks for all obtained packages into package/feeds/ -
Run
make menuconfig
to select your preferred configuration for the toolchain, target system & firmware packages. -
Run
make
to build your firmware. This will download all sources, build the cross-compile toolchain and then cross-compile the GNU/Linux kernel & all chosen applications for your target system.
Related Repositories
The main repository uses multiple sub-repositories to manage packages of
different categories. All packages are installed via the OpenWrt package
manager called opkg
. If you're looking to develop the web interface or port
packages to OpenWrt, please find the fitting repository below.
-
LuCI Web Interface: Modern and modular interface to control the device via a web browser.
-
OpenWrt Packages: Community repository of ported packages.
-
OpenWrt Routing: Packages specifically focused on (mesh) routing.
Support Information
For a list of supported devices see the OpenWrt Hardware Database
Documentation
Support Community
- Forum: For usage, projects, discussions and hardware advise.
- Support Chat: Channel
#openwrt
on freenode.net.
Developer Community
- Bug Reports: Report bugs in OpenWrt
- Dev Mailing List: Send patches
- Dev Chat: Channel
#openwrt-devel
on freenode.net.
License
OpenWrt is licensed under GPL-2.0