Adding Gainstrong MiniBox v1.0 support to OpenWrt 15.05

Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-10-19

OpenWrt supports a plethora of devices. Recently, a fellow OpenWrt user with Gainstrong's MiniBox v1.0 - a mini router from some Chinese manufacturer - was wondering if he should try his hand at OpenWrt's upcoming release (15.05 codename 'Chaos Calmer'), or stick with 14.07 and keep important packages like OpenSSL up to date. After pointing him to the relevant Makefile, I started wondering about how hard it would be to port device support forward to 15.05. After all, the manufacturer has the full source code online for 14.07 - so how hard could it be, diffing it against a vanilla 14.07 tree and adjusting for 15.05?

The diff required some tinkering to apply cleanly to a 15.05 tree - I learned a bit of quilt in the process - and I had to add a new profile to target/linux/ar71xx/image/Makefile:

define Device/minibox-v1
    $(Device/tplink-16mlzma)
    BOARDNAME := MINIBOX-V1
    DEVICE_PROFILE := MINIBOXV1
    TPLINK_HWID := 0x3C000201
    CONSOLE := ttyATH0,115200
endef
TARGET_DEVICES += minibox-v1

The real catch, though, turned out getting make menuconfig to pick up the new profile Makefile. Since it doesn't do that by default, you have to trigger it manually - either by running

$ touch target/linux/ar71xx/Makefile

or by removing the tmp/ folder in your local git or SVN checkout. Only then you'll see the new Gainstrong MiniBox v1.0 target appear.

OpenWrt devs won't be accepting any new devices for 15.05 anymore at this point, so if you want to build 15.05 for the Minibox, you can grab the patch here, and if you want it for trunk, you can get that here as well. They have been offered for inclusion upstream.

Update 2015-10-19: OpenWrt now supports the MiniBox both in its stable release (15.05 Chaos Calmer) and trunk.