Running OpenWRT on the Plusnet Hub One (& BT Home Hub 5a)

[#1]

I used USB casing as gnd. I used a pin to short boot_sel2 temporarily.

[#2]

As far as I can recall, only the two lower pins on the switch are connected to GND.

http://openwrt.ebilan.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=39#p1030

As pointed out by jimbof, the boot_sel2 should not be permanently wired to GND.

If you are not getting terminal response with just RX, TX and GND connected, then something is clearly wrong.  You haven't said what type of USB-serial adapter you are using or the colour wiring scheme to the adapter. 

Have you tried shorting the RX and TX together on the USB-serial adapter to check you get an echo response from the terminal when you randomly type anything on the keyboard?

I may be mistaken, but from your photo it also looks like you are using an exposed length of the outer screen of the cable to provide your GND connection - which TBH is a bit 'iffy' if it should accidentally contact any other part of the PCB.

[#3]

Thank you for your responses.
I've not yet swapped the TX and RX, I'll do that last - I want to get GND connections right first.
If I short boot_sel2 to the ground, the modem is not supposed to go through the full boot sequence, is that not right? I have, after reading your responses, tried grounding it to the bottom pins of the switch - but it still boots fully, with LEDs going through green/cyan/blue/orange phases. I must be doing something wrong here. I'm sure I've soldered this (yellow) wire to R45 and it should be boot_sel2.
To answer other questions, my USB to UART cable is Prolific PL2303-based, the unisolated braid is the ground wire and it's not the outer screen - my cable doesn't have one. I'm also double- and triple-checking that this wire does not touch any other contacts (as are the other wires).
One idea I have is - I'm using the WPS button for grounding - should I perhaps use the other, Reboot one?

[#4]

If you have a multimeter you can check for ground . With the hub power off, put the multimeter it on the lowest resistance/ohm settings. Touch one end on your braided cable, preferably on the end that's connected to your serial usb thingy and the other on various other switches or points you think are ground. If you get 0 ohms (or anything below 1 ohm) its looks like that point is ok.

Similarly check your other connections.

Put 1 end of your test lead on the end of your blue lead near the barcode sticker & the other on the R77 pad closest to your soldered wire. Again if you get 0 ohms then that connection is ok.

Also do the same for the yellow lead and R78.

Finally check the boot  select yellow lead and R45

Even if your leads are not touching anything they're not supposed to yet, they might in the the process of flashing. You have to connect an ethernet cable to one of the Lan ports at 1 point and connect/disconnect flash drive into the usb port a few times. I fried one board because i had the leads like yours which put a strain on the solder pads on the board and so broke off halfway through flashing!. Second time round i used a more flexible thinner lead and taped it to the edge of the board.

[#5]

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OK people, thanks for your help so far - I got over the wiring up stage. What I initially thought was a router failing to powerup and no LEDs working, turned out to be UART boot mode - I swapped my TX and RX and can see the output now.

That's not mentioned anywhere that in this mode there's no lights and the board should appear dead!

Here's the stage I'm at right now:

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@core2lee91 wrote:
<...>
If you are using Linux then download the openwrt-lantiq-bthomehubv5a_ram-u-boot.asc file and send it to the Serial TTY using the cat program;
$ cat openwrt-lantiq-bthomehubv5a_ram-u-boot.asc > /dev/ttyAMA0

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except I'm using /dev/ttyUSB0

when running the command above (from Ubuntu live-cd as I normally use Windows) I would get:

Cannot open /dev/ttyUSB0: Permission denied

a bit of googling helped me find a resolution:

sudo adduser ubuntu dialout
sudo chmod a+rw /dev/ttyUSB0

after which, I could proceed. Hope it helps someone after me

Next step: set up a TFTP under Ubuntu...

[#6]

Why dont you use windows to do this? Would be quicker and far easier. All you need is Putty & tftp.

Here are the link for the same http://openwrt.ebilan.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=138 and I have followed it with success.

[#7]

Hello people,

I'm at it again. I've gotten as far as running a "LiveCD" version of openwrt, so to speak - this is what I mean by LiveCD:

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@core2lee91 wrote:
tftpboot openwrt-lantiq-xrx200-BTHOMEHUBV5A-install-uImage-initramfs; bootm

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I've done all the backups and that, meaning the next step would be to flash new firmware to NAND, but there's an issue:

a number of commands is not present in the "LiveCD" build I've got, amongst them, "mount" - so I cannot mount a USB drive:

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@core2lee91 wrote:
$ mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

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I've managed to transfer my backups out of the device over Ethernet with netcat, but what's the way to get the files - firmware file in this case - into the device?

[#8]

I am just stating the obvious but my mount was on /Dev/sda. It showed the mount point when I plugged in the USB drive and each time I removed and reattached it went from sda to sdb to sdc.

I am no Linux expert and more of a windows user but just checking that you aren't missing the obvious step?

Also you can send files via specialist SSH tools. I used a tool to upload bin files when I couldn't locate the mount point.

[#9]

Anyone had issues with the 5ghz WiFi band? Mine keeps crashing & shows 0% signal strength. A reeboot brings it back up.

Running the mikeC openwrt version. Also how do you update all packages?

[#10]

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@alag20 wrote:
I am just stating the obvious but my mount was on /Dev/sda. I plugged in the USB drive and each time I removed and reattached it went from sda to sdb to sdc.
<...>
I am no Linux expert and more of a windows user but just checking that you aren't missing the obvious step?

---

sorted that. Mine was /dev/sda no matter how many times I plugged and unplugged it, but it still won't mount. I could only sort it by using a different USB stick - perhaps, 16GB was too big for this router to recognize.

Anyway, you can congratulate me as I've now got OpenWRT with LuCi!

Next step - connecting to the internet!

(I know there's OpenWRT Wiki so I'll stick to the questions specific to this PN Hub 1)

My situation is - the router would establish ADSL session (I'm on ADSL) but won't go online because it won't authenticate.

I've edited my WAN interface to use PPPoATM protocol, VCI 0/VPI 38, entered correct username and password. Logs suggest it cannot receive a valid response when authenticating. I'll paste my logs later, but in the meantime I have two thoughts:

1) I've seen on Ebilan forums that different builds are using different xDSL drivers - so if the device establishes DSL session (reaches showtime state) but cannon authenticate - could it still be a driver issue or is it purely a bad config?

2) My config uses ptm0 interface to authenticate. Is it the right one?

[#11]

See Ebilan 'Help Noob setup ADSL' , last post. He's a PlusNet Adsl user.

[#12]

See Ebilan 'Help noob setup adsl', last post. He's a PN adsl user.

[#13]

Please refer to the other post for help connecting to adsl (JRC11's comment above).

However, I would recommend you to upgrade to LEDE as speeds on this are much higher than MikeC's OpenWrt build for me. One possible reason is the newer dsl firmware.

Here are the screenshots from my LEDE Luci config to assist.

[#14]

Thank you for the screenshots, but it looks as though you can only solve this problem by editing the configs manually

It looks like a quite common newbie problem, but so far I've not seen anyone describe how they've fixed it.

This is what I had in the logs:

Mon Aug 31 21:04:35 2015 daemon.notice netifd: Interface 'wan' is setting up now
Mon Aug 31 21:04:35 2015 daemon.info pppd[4177]: Plugin pppoatm.so loaded.
Mon Aug 31 21:04:35 2015 daemon.info pppd[4177]: PPPoATM plugin_init
Mon Aug 31 21:04:35 2015 daemon.info pppd[4177]: PPPoATM setdevname_pppoatm - SUCCESS:0.0.38
Mon Aug 31 21:04:35 2015 daemon.notice pppd[4177]: pppd 2.4.7 started by root, uid 0
Mon Aug 31 21:04:35 2015 daemon.err pppd[4177]: connect(0.0.38): No such device
Mon Aug 31 21:04:35 2015 daemon.info pppd[4177]: Exit.
Mon Aug 31 21:04:35 2015 daemon.notice netifd: Interface 'wan' is now down 

Repeating infinitely.

To solve this, all you need to do is go to /etc/config/network (I did a SSH connection using WinSCP) and edit the following line:

option xfer_mode 'ptm'

change it to:

option xfer_mode 'atm'

save the file and reboot the rooter. Done! This is what the log file should look after this:

Fri Nov  4 10:55:46 2016 daemon.notice netifd: Interface 'wan' is setting up now
Fri Nov  4 10:55:46 2016 daemon.info pppd[2388]: Plugin pppoatm.so loaded.
Fri Nov  4 10:55:46 2016 daemon.info pppd[2388]: PPPoATM plugin_init
Fri Nov  4 10:55:46 2016 daemon.info pppd[2388]: PPPoATM setdevname_pppoatm - SUCCESS:0.0.38
Fri Nov  4 10:55:46 2016 daemon.notice pppd[2388]: pppd 2.4.7 started by root, uid 0
Fri Nov  4 10:55:46 2016 kern.info kernel: [   50.768382] pppoa-wan: renamed from ppp0
Fri Nov  4 10:55:46 2016 daemon.info pppd[2388]: Using interface pppoa-wan
Fri Nov  4 10:55:46 2016 daemon.notice pppd[2388]: Connect: pppoa-wan <--> 0.0.38
Fri Nov  4 10:55:49 2016 daemon.info pppd[2388]: CHAP authentication succeeded: CHAP authentication success
Fri Nov  4 10:55:49 2016 daemon.notice pppd[2388]: CHAP authentication succeeded

Credits: http://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,15918.msg321715.html#msg321715

P.S. the above applies to ASDL connection with PPPoA.

[#15]

How to configure the modem HiLink (Huawei e3131s-2) with a BT Home Hub 5A on OpenWRT?