My parents’ ASUS RT-16N has been running dd-wrt for years now. I recently enhanced it with optware but something went horribly wrong after a few days. A drive out to their house revealed that the whole unit had spontaneously reset itself to factory defaults.

OpenWRT has come a long way since I last investigated it. I decided to give it another try as it’s till actively being developed whereas dd-wrt is not.

The wiki article on this device is a little bit out of date. I had to update it a little bit to get it to work.

To install OpenWRT on this device, SSH into it and run the following commands:

cd /tmp
wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/barrier_breaker/14.07/brcm47xx/generic/openwrt-brcm47xx-generic-squashfs.trx mtd -r write openwrt-brcm47xx-generic-squashfs.trx linux

That part went smoothly. The last part to configure was wireless N. After some searching I came across this post on the OpenWRT forums which worked nicely for me.  SSH into the router and do the following to enable full wireless N functionality:

opkg update
opkg install kmod-brcmsmac
opkg install kmod-brcmutil
rmmod b43
rmmod b43legacy
rmmod wl
rmmod brcmsmac
rmmod brcmutil
modprobe brcmsmac

# make sure to delete the old config files ... you have to ...
rm -f /etc/config/wireless 
wifi detect > /etc/config/wireless
vi /etc/config/wireless

Now comment out # "option disabled 1"

I had to take navid’s steps a little bit further by tweaking /etc/config/wireless a bit to add some features. My working wireless configuration is below:

config wifi-device 'radio0'
 option type 'mac80211'
 option channel '11'
 option hwmode '11ng'
 option path 'bcma0:0'
 list ht_capab 'GF'
 list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
 list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
 option txpower '19'
 option country '00'

config wifi-iface
 option device 'radio0'
 option network 'lan'
 option mode 'ap'
 option ssid 'SSID'
 option encryption 'psk2'
 option key 'SSIDKEY'

Success! Fully functional OpenWRT on my parents’ Asus RT-16N.