I purchased a Banana Pi R3 mini to experiment with Quectel cellular modems. I’ve powered on the BPI-R3 mini with the memory switch in the EMMC position. The board comes up and and I can connect to the wifi and then go to the luci interface at 192.168.1.1.
I’d like to flash the Rooter firmware for the BPI-R3 mini. Can I do this through the luci interface? Is this the proper way to flash/change the firmware? I’m guessing since the memory switch is in the EMMC position, it will write the firmware in EMMC?
Sorry in advance for the “basic” question. This is the first “Pi” board I’ve worked with. Thank you.
Yes, I was able to load the Rooter firmware on the Banana Pi R3 mini. It broke the NAND boot, which I fixed in another thread. If you’re not familiar with loading firmware, using the UART adapter and recovering the device, you should do some research first to make things easier if you run in to problems.
You’ll need a USB drive to load the firmware. Here’s how I loaded the Rooter Firmware:
Create a directory on your computer to hold all the necessary files to update the firmware
Download the latest Banana Pi R3 mini firmware from the ROOter Autobuilds website in to the new directory.
Go to the OpenWrt firmware selector page OpenWrt Firmware Selector for the Banana Pi R3 Mini and download all the files (8 of them) to the new directory you created.
Copy the 8 OpenWrt files and the Rooter firmware to your USB drive.
I installed the Rooter firmware to eMMC. To install to eMMC you need to:
1) Set boot switch to boot from SPI-NAND (assuming stock rom is running there).
2) Insert your USB drive with the OpenWrt files and the Rooter firmware in to the Banana Pi R3 mini. Power on the R3 mini.
3) Open a terminal window on your computer and ssh in to the Banana Pi R3 mini (ssh [email protected])
4) After you are connected, cd /mnt/sda1/ (or whatever directory the USB drive shows up as)
5) VERIFY the files names from OpenWrt are the same as the files listed below!!!!
6) cp openwrt-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r3-mini-emmc-gpt.bin /tmp
7) dd if=/tmp/openwrt-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r3-mini-emmc-gpt.bin of=/dev/mmcblk0
8) Reboot (to reload partition tables)
9)cp openwrt-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r3-mini-initramfs-recovery.itb /tmp
cp openwrt-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r3-mini-emmc-preloader.bin /tmp
cp openwrt-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r3-mini-emmc-bl31-uboot.fip /tmp
cp Banana-Pi-R3-Mini-MWAN3-GO2024-xx-xx-upgrade.itb /tmp (This is the Rooter firmware. xx-xx is the date of the autobuild)
10) echo 0 > /sys/block/mmcblk0boot0/force_ro
dd if=/tmp/openwrt-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r3-mini-emmc-preloader.bin of=/dev/mmcblk0boot0
dd if=/tmp/openwrt-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r3-mini-emmc-bl31-uboot.fip of=/dev/mmcblk0p3
dd if=/tmp/openwrt-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r3-mini-initramfs-recovery.itb of=/dev/mmcblk0p4
dd if=/tmp/Banana-Pi-R3-Mini-MWAN3-GO2024-12-28-upgrade.itb of=/dev/mmcblk0p5
sync
11) Remove the device from power, set boot switch to **eMMC** and power the Banana Pi R3 mini back on. Wifi should come up and you'll see Rooter2g and Rooter5g. You can also connect an ethernet cable from the R3 mini to your computer.
Read through some of the various posts on the R3 mini. Information is scattered across many different posts.
The rooter firmware really runs good on the Banana Pi R3 mini.
Awesome! the installation went smoothly! I haven’t tried booting in NAND yet to see if the installation broke it. Will try and find your other thread on how to fix it when I test it out. How did you manage to install packages? opkg update doesn’t seem to work. This thread mentions using apk instead but the package isn’t available on latest rooter snapshot.
With the rooter firmware you are not able to update or add any kmod packages. I noticed that also that the opkg update fails. I haven’t had time to look in to how to fix it. I’ll take a look at the link you posted. Maybe also post a message on the Rooter forum?
Since the firmware is on Autobuild, any recent changes or updates to the packages would be incorporated in to the firmware.
On the Rooter website there is a tutorial on custom building Rooter firmware. If there are packages you want to add to the firmware, you’ll have to add them to the config file and custom build the rooter firmware. Here is the link for building firmware: ROOter by Of Modems and Men
