A portable router with an onboard 2000mAh battery. See also TP-Link TL-MR10U, TP-Link TL-MR12U and TP-Link TL-MR13U or TL-MR3020, TL-MR3040 and TL-WR703N.

Note: Many of these routers are marketed as a “3G travel router” but none actually include a 3G modem - the marketing term rather means that the OEM firmware supports USB 3G modems because it contains drivers for USB modems! Ignore that, because with OpenWrt ANY router with USB supports 3G hardware…

Price: AliExpress - about 35 USD

As with most TP-Link Routers this one can be flashed using the TP-Link Webinterface. The webinterface is chinese, but http://192.168.1.1/userRpm/SoftwareUpgradeRpm.htm is the firmware upgrade page, where you can upload the firmware file. Note that you cannot navigate to this page directly, and need to come from the page http://192.168.1.1/userRpm/DateTimeCfgRpm.htm. An easy way to navigate the pages is by hovering over the menu links and viewing the URL in the status bar of your browser.

Please consult →generic.flashing and also TL-WR703N and TL-MR3020.

• The serial is p1 layout: p1 |VCC|GND|RX|TX|, more info checkout https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=155882
• Setup serial console 115200 8n1, for example: stty -F /dev/ttyUSB0 115200 && cu -l /dev/ttyUSB0
• Enter “tpl” as soon as U-Boot announces “Autobooting in 1 seconds”
• Setup your eth0 to 192.168.1.100, you can check detail by 'printenv'
• Run blow command under U-Boot:

tftpboot 0x81000000 openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr11u-v1-squashfs-factory.bin
erase 0x9f020000 +0x3c0000
cp.b 0x81000000 0x9f020000 0x3c0000
bootm 9f020000

See bootlog.

→generic.sysupgrade

A custom image with ipv6 support: radvd, wide-dhcpv6, 3g stick support, made for RCS-RDS Fiberlink dual stack PPPoE service, but should be okay for static wan settings on other ISPs: http://www.ip6.ro/firmware/mr11u/

1. you could read about bootloader in general and about Das U-Boot in particular.

Forum member pepe2k made a modification of U-Boot 1.1.4 for Qualcomm Atheros SoCs based devices (the project is still being developed, so new devices and SoCs will be supported in the future). Up to date information, binary images and sources can be found on official GitHub repository.

This modification started from wr703n-uboot-with-web-failsafe project, but supports more devices, all modern web browsers, has a lot of improvements and other modifications (like U-Boot NetConsole, custom commands, overclocking possibilities etc.).

More information:

• Official repository on GitHub: U-Boot 1.1.4 modification for routers
• Discussion about this project on OpenWrt forum
• An article (in Polish) about one of the first version of this project on www.tech-blog.pl