UPGRADING TP-LINK ARCHER C7 AC1750 TO USE WITH OPENWRT

Why OpenWRT?

One of my home access points is TP-Link Archer C7. I purchased it to get all benefits of the 5Ghz 802.11ac standard for the laptop and 2.4Ghz band for the older devices. However, it was never working for me well:

• In 5Ghz band Apple devices were working very unstable
• Sometime i had to reboot router because of wifi stability issues. After reboot it was working until next issue. There are no debug options/logs in the native firmware.
• Device was spamming network with STP packets and some other data, no way to disable.
• After upgrading to the new firmware versions i had to reconfigure it completely. And in fact difference between regullary updated versions was minimal
• Native firmware configurable only via web interface, probably backdoors are included 

So i decided to reflash it to the OpenWRT and found, that i am “happy” owner of the TP-Link Archer C7v1, with AR1A (v1) variant of QCA9880 chip, not supported in the open source ath10k driver. So there is no way to use 5Ghz with OpenWRT at all. Only good thing that 5Ghz chip is not soldered on the board, but connected to the PCIe mini card socket. So i decided to replace it.



https://smallhacks.wordpress.com/2015/11/22/upgrading-tp-link-archer-c7-ac1750-to-use-with-openwrt/

https://downloads.openwrt.org/chaos_calmer/15.05/ar71xx/generic/openwrt-15.05-ar71xx-generic-archer-c7-v1-squashfs-factory.bin