Was looking for the best AC wifi router to replace my Buffalo WHR-G300NH and found that TP-Link has just released an Archer C7 V2 which has wifi card supported by ath10k driver based on the information found
here.
Here is the packaging, it says that it supports Unifi & Maxis Fiber but the support is not out of the box. You need to ask the seller a beta firmware which has VLAN support but I couldn't get mine working using even the beta firmware on my Maxis Fiber. Emailed TP-Link support but got a reply saying that they don't have Unifi/Maxis Fiber ready firmware and asked if I want to swap with one that already have, but nah, I bought the router not for running the stock firmware anyway.
Ver 2.0 hardware as per the sticker.
Anyway, I waited for a week or so and someone came up with the new hardware profile which creates the correct firmware image for OpenWrt. If you've this new V2.0 hardware and wanted to run OpenWrt on it but couldn't wait to get the patches into the trunk, check this patches:
To build your own OpenWrt firmware for this ver 2.0 hardware, followed these steps:
1. Have Debian 6.0 or any development system which could cross-compile the OpenWrt firmware. There are many guides available on the net, but for me, I've a VMWare Debian 6.0 VM ready on my Hackintosh machine.
3. To generate the image, I was using the following command, I need the ath10k and luci support in the image:
$ make image PROFILE=ARCHERC7V2 PACKAGES="ath10k luci"
4. The generated image ready to be flashed can be found in the bin/ar7xxx/ as openwrt-ar71xx-generic-archer-c7-v2-squashfs-factory.bin
UPDATE: The profile has been updated into the mainstream trunk distribution and the trunk now contains the image for Archer C7 V2.0. The image can be downloaded here:
http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-archer-c7-v2-squashfs-factory.bin
1-4: Do not forget that the trunk images do not contain LUCI, so, you may need to login into your router using ssh or telnet. Get it to the net and install LUCI using command line or, if you want to, you could follow the step 1-4 above, have you own image rebuild with the necessary LUCI packages.
UPDATE: The latest Barrier Breaker RC3 can be downloaded now. This has the fixes for 5GHz band which includes the calibrated setting etc. I've tested this with multi devices that support the 5GHz band and they work just fine. Please head up here to download the latest image:
http://downloads.openwrt.org/barrier_breaker/14.07-rc3/ar71xx/generic/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-archer-c7-v2-squashfs-factory.bin
LATEST UPDATE: Barrier Breaker has been available for many months now, so, please download it from the official website. Please read the comments left by visitors, they may contain important information that is helpful to make full use of the features available for this router.
5. Go and flash the firmware, do remember, the default IP address for OpenWrt router is 192.168.1.1.
To get Maxis Fiber to run, just go to network->vlan and have the following, surely don't forget to set the PPPOE userid and password:
That should be it.
