TL-WR710N Modifications

Hello all, I just hardware-modded a TP-Link wireless router and wanted to share.

First of all, the device has following hardware; Atheros AR7240 as platform, AR93xx as integrated wifi, 32 mb ram, 8 mb rom (this is very important, as most of the same class devices has 4 mb rom), a USB port, 2 LAN/WAN Ethernet interfaces. It powers up via a wall-socket.

 

The exact model I used is TP-Link TL-WR710N v1.2 (there are revision numbers to all TP-Link devices that can be seen on the labels of the boxes, in my case mine was v1.2).  

 

First modification I wanted to do was a battery mod; so I figured two cables can be soldered to the under the cap called c207, as red to square (+) and black to round (-) and the device can be powered up with 4 AA battery. If you desire so, you can use USB 1A too. I also shared the same pics on OpenWRT Wiki and Forums.

 

Next I re-connected the original wall-socket input cables. So if I wanted to use a wall-socket, I'll be able to.

 

Also I added a switch for usb mod, you can see below, not that important.

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Next was Antenna Mod; I first learnt that I need to break the connection between -below- these 2 connection.

 

then of course soldered a tail antenna from a broken adsl modem.

 

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After that I of course changed the firmware with OpenWRT and live happily ever after. TP-Link Routers are awesome devices for OpenWRT. I highly recommend TP-Link for such occasions. This device is also a very good example to that, 'cause it has 8 mb rom.

Peace...