Getting started
Before plugging the Development Kit in for the first time, it's worth familiarizing yourself with both: the ports on the back of the device as well as the First boot procedure.
Connectors
More detailed information about the ports is provided in Hardware description
0
USB-c power
1
USB-c
2
USB-c UART
3
eth0
4
eth1
5
eth2
6
eth3 10GE
7
eth4 10GE
First boot
Connect the power cable and the UART cable to your computer. ( Power is left most, UART is right most. )
Open a serial terminal:
(Adjust the device path if needed—check
ls /dev/ttyUSB*to find yours.)You should now see output from the device.
Press the reset button to observe the full boot sequence. The device will boot through U-Boot, which displays a countdown before loading the OS. You can either:
Let it continue — boots into OpenWRT on the eMMC.
Press any key — interrupts the countdown and drops you into the U-Boot shell.
When attaching the USB cable to the router's UART, in dmesg you will see something like:
Recovery Linux
To explore the firmware or troubleshoot issues, enter the following in U-Boot:
This boots a minimal Linux environment from NOR flash. While its primary purpose is recovering a broken main OS, it's also useful for low-level system maintenance and learning how the components work.
The default user is root with no password.
To exit Recovery Linux and boot into OpenWRT:
It seems we introduced a bug in building the final OpenWRT image, resulting in the device not having the LuCI (web gui) installed. In order to fix that, you'll need to reflash the eMMC drive on the board, but worry not, it only takes a couple of minutes!
With UART connected, reset the device, interrupt the u-boot countdown, then run these commands:
Keep in mind: you should do this as soon as possible, because you will lose all configuration. Or make a backup if you already configured the router.
If you need help, drop by our Discord and we'll help you sort this out!
Status LED
During boot, U-Boot runs a series of hardware tests to verify that all I2C devices are present and functioning correctly. This includes power sensors, thermal sensors, the fan controller, power delivery controller, EEPROM, and more.
Green (solid)
All hardware tests passed
Red (solid)
One or more tests failed
Orange (pulsing)
Booted into Recovery Linux
White (solid)
Booted into OpenWRT
If the LED turns red, reset the device and check the U-Boot output via the serial console—it will report which chip failed its test.
Next steps
Using OpenWRT (default)
The Development Kit ships with OpenWRT pre-installed. To start using it, simply connect a client device to one of the RJ-45 ports, navigate to 192.168.1.1 in your browser, and use LuCI to configure the device.
Installing OpenWRT packages
The default install has the following apk repositories, which allows you to add new repos to the customfeeds.list ( or distfeeds.list, not sure it makes any difference ).
To add the standard packages/pacakages, verify, and update
To add the LuCI web interface packages:
Wow. That's a lot of packages
Now install luci
Finally, start uhttpd
In most cases, this should be enough to now connect to the web interface. In my case, I need to add a firewall rule to allow traffic from another subnet.
Browsing to the IP of your router with http should now work.
Installing an alternative OS
If you'd prefer to run Debian or Mono SDK Linux instead, see Alternative operating systems. This is coming soon.
Last updated