Support for Google Onhub devices

[Brian Norris]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 8:43 AM Thomas Deselaers <deselaers at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey folks,

Hi!

> I have an Onhub router and some Google Wifi repeaters. Google recently
> announced that they are going to shut down the support for Onhub
> (effectively bricking them) by end of 2022.
>
> I have done a bit of research and it seems like there was some
> preliminary support for OpenWRT on these devices at some point. I
> guess there will be a lot of Onhubs that would be pretty good OpenwRT
> routers in about a year - which otherwise, are probably going to the
> trash.
>
> While I am a developer, I have only very little openWRT experience and
> I have been wondering what it would take to bring up support for these
> devices.

It's not likely to be a great "first hacking on OpenWRT" experience,
but it should technically be possible...

FWIW, I've been hacking on Google WiFi, the successor of the OnHub. I
have it working, and documented pretty much everything here:

https://openwrt.org/inbox/toh/google/google_wifi

For the OnHub, you could leverage the same partition formatting (OnHub
is also running a similar Chrome OS bootloader), but you'd have to
bring up a different SoC (OnHub uses ipq8064, while Google WiFi is
ipq4019). OnHub also doesn't have as easy of serial-console access for
hacking. And I don't see documentation for Developer Mode on OnHub,
although I know it's possible.

But, I'm interested, and if you really have the stamina to hack on it,
I can be a sounding board!

Regard,
Brian