I was recently looking for a router to buy, my primary concerns being OpenWRT support, good amounts of ROM and RAM, and a not so expensive price. I came across the Cudy WR3000 series, and I decided to go for the Cudy WR3000E on Amazon. The router has 128MB of ROM, plenty of space for any packages or configuration one can make, and 256MB RAM, which is enough for my use case. You can see the full specification on the Cudy website.

It is a great product for the price I purchased it at (45EUR), and it was actually 5EUR cheaper than the Cudy WR3000, which according to my research has 16MB of ROM and one less LAN port (an overall worse model, as for why it is more expensive, I have no clue).

When getting a router for OpenWRT, always make sure and double check that the router you are buying actually supports OpenWRT. There are many times when producers sell different versions of the product under the same name, and sometimes there exists OpenWRT support for only a specific version. You can check out the OpenWRT table of hardware for all the models that are currently supported.

Flashing OpenWRT

Flashing the router is pretty straight forward, as the instructions are the same for the Cudy WR3000, which has an OpenWRT wiki page detailing the process. Although the Google Drive link on the wiki is currently outdated.

Getting the firmware files

Before we start, you will need two files: a Cudy signed OpenWRT image, and the OpenWRT sysupgrade image. You can find the Cudy signed image on their Google Drive. If you do not trust the link I provided, you can start at the OpenWRT wiki where they linked a Cudy blog. The other image you need can be found from the OpenWRT firmware selector, where you just search for the model and download the sysupgrade image.

Since this specific router model has a lot of storage, I would recommend going through the packages in the “Customize installed packages and/or first boot script” section and adding the ones you would need. In my case, I needed the wpad-openssl package instead of the wpad-basic-mbedtls one that comes with the image, so I just adjusted the installed packages and requested the build.

After getting these two files on your computer, now you need to connect to the router.

Connecting to the router and flashing

The router comes with an Ethernet cable out of the box, which I recommend using since the installation of the Cudy signed image will disable the wireless radios. Connect to your router’s network, and go to http://192.168.10.1/. Here, you will see the Cudy router page. Just hand wave through the configuration, it does not really matter since it will all be wiped anyway. Navigate to Advanced Settings/System/Firmware, upload the Cudy signed image, and press proceed.

After the router finishes flashing the image, it will reboot, and you will not be able to access the admin page from the same address since OpenWRT uses http://192.168.1.1 as the router address. At this point your wireless radios will also be disabled, so you need a wired connection. Go to the router’s address and now to System/(Backup/Flash firmware)/Flash new firmware image, upload the sysupgrade image you downloaded earlier (not the Cudy signed one!), and make sure not to keep any settings.

Your router will reboot, and now you will have a (hopefully) working OpenWRT 24.10.2 router!

Next steps

You are free to do whatever you want, and the full configuration is way out of scope for this blog, but I would start with enabling the wireless radios, making a network and making sure the router is connected to the internet properly. I am currently writing a post on creating a private network on IEEE 802.1X, so stay tuned if that interests you.