WARNING: new WL-330N3G devices cannot become a Meteobridge
Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 12:48 pm
Deep diving on a situation where a Meteobridge user wants to flash an ASUS WL-330N3G and did not had success on that turned out that there is a new batch of these devices in the market that CANNOT BE FLASHED WITH METEOBRIDGE FIRMWARE.
You can't see that from the outside, as ASUS did not change any serial number etc. Inspecting the PCBs there is also no difference. Only, when you solder a serial console to the PCB, you can see that the new version does have a different bootloader installed. This boot loader blocks installing the Meteobridge image when being in recovery mode. I don't know if ASUS did this by accident and also their own software cannot be loaded from recovery mode, but as a matter of fact pushing Meteobridge or any other OpenWRT based firmware to it does not work anymore.
Therefore, I recommend not to buy ASUS WL-330N3G, as you might run into these problems without a chance to solve it. At the moment I am not very optimistic that I can solve the issue. So WL-330N3G is out of the game for now. Sorry!
You can't see that from the outside, as ASUS did not change any serial number etc. Inspecting the PCBs there is also no difference. Only, when you solder a serial console to the PCB, you can see that the new version does have a different bootloader installed. This boot loader blocks installing the Meteobridge image when being in recovery mode. I don't know if ASUS did this by accident and also their own software cannot be loaded from recovery mode, but as a matter of fact pushing Meteobridge or any other OpenWRT based firmware to it does not work anymore.

Therefore, I recommend not to buy ASUS WL-330N3G, as you might run into these problems without a chance to solve it. At the moment I am not very optimistic that I can solve the issue. So WL-330N3G is out of the game for now. Sorry!