⭐️ Major Beta Firmware Update: OpenWRT 23.05 and the new Documentation site ⭐️

Lazar Demin

What’s new?

Two big items!

New Documentation site for the new firmware is available
Firmware based on OpenWRT release 23.05.3 is available!

New Documentation Site

Documentation for the “new” firmware based on OpenWRT 23.05 is now live at: https://documentation.onioniot.com/

This will be the main documentation site going forward!

Just like we started with a clean slate for the firmware, this is a clean slate for documentation. Our goal was to start from scratch, organize the documentation in a way that makes it useful to readers, and not carry over every single item from the existing legacy documentation.

We used Docusaurus - a modern static website generator - as the underlying platform for the documentation site instead of a homebrew solution. It is easy to maintain and deploy, very customizable, and looks quite good in our opinion.

The documentation is open source and available on GitHub: https://github.com/OnionIoT/documentation

Work on the documentation is still in progress - so expect to see updates.

Our goal is to make this documentation as useful as possible for our users. To make that happen we’ll need your help! We’ve added comment sections to each article - if anything is missing, confusing, or needs attention, login with Github and drop a comment right in the article.

You can also give us longer feedback by creating an issue in the OnionIoT/documentation GitHub repo. We also accept PRs for direct contributions!

We’re happy to hear your thoughts on what information you need to successfully work with the Omega and update the documentation accordingly!

What about documentation for the v0.3.4 firmware??

The existing documentation at https://docs.onion.io/ will remain available and focused on the v0.3.4 (and earlier) firmware. We will make updates there as needed. But expect it to remain largely the same.

We will call this the legacy documentation site going forward.

New Firmware based on OpenWRT 23.05

A new release of Onion customized firmware is now available!

Highlights include:

Migrated to the OpenWRT 23.05.3 release
Running Linux kernel 5.15
Run-time loadable Device Tree Overlays are fully supported - easily extend the hardware capabilities of the device within Linux
- No longer have to build firmware from scratch to support additional hardware!
Added support for more hardware interfaces
- Hardware PWM - learn more here.
- p44-ledchain to control WS281x LEDs (Neopixels) - learn more here.
- One Wire support (using DT Overlay) - learn more here.
- Better SPI support - using DT Overlay for software-based SPI bus and Python spidev module added for both software and hardware SPI bus control - learn more here and here.
- Quectel EC25 LTE modem support (used on the Omega2 LTE) - learn more here.
Fixed the GPIO numbering - GPIO numbers in Linux match the Omega2 pinout diagrams
Supports NodeJS v18 - as far as we know, modern versions of Node are not supported on any other MIPS platform - learn more here.

How can I get and use this firmware?

The firmware is available in the Onion software repository: http://repo.onioniot.com/omega2/images/openwrt-23.05/

See the Installing the New Firmware article on the new documentation site for instructions on how to take this firmware for a spin

️ The New Firmware works differently from previous versions ️
Try it out on a small scale before rolling it out to production! For a detailed list of changes to the firmware, see the What’s New article on the new documentation site.

Is it easy to build my own version of this firmware?

That’s a great question!

We’ve heard from many users that making customizations to the Onion firmware is hard, confusing, and time-consuming. We’ve put in work to update and simplify this process - it now takes minutes instead of hours! Spend less time setting up the environment and building everything from scratch, and use that time to focus on your application!

See the full break-down of how we build customized firmware in the new documentation.

In a nutshell:

All customizations are encapsulated as
- Patches to the OpenWRT Build System
- Software Packages
We use the Build System to create customized versions of the OpenWRT SDK and Image Builder
Onion packages are compiled using the OpenWRT SDK - learn more here.
Firmware (featuring Onion packages) is built using the OpenWRT Image Builder - learn more here.

To make your own customized packages and firmware, we suggest doing steps 3 and 4 with some modifications for your own purposes!

How can I report bugs or give feedback?

We value your input and are eager to hear about your experiences with the firmware. Feel free to post in this thread - I’ll be around to chat!

If you have specific improvement suggestions (or bugs to report), you can create an Issue in the OnionIoT/OpenWRT-Packages GitHub Repo. There are issue templates you can use for Improvement Suggestions/Feature Requests and Bug Reports.

What happened to the earlier 22.03 beta firmware?

We continued working on it! I neglected to update the community on our progress - that’s my bad.

After the previous update on the 22.03 firmware we followed through on the next steps from that post:

Upgraded to the OpenWRT 22.03.5 release
Add support for:
- Hardware PWM
- p44-ledchain to control WS281x LEDs (Neopixels)
- Device Tree overlays loadable during run time
- Added one-wire support
- Added Python spidev module for interacting with the SPI bus
- Added software SPI support

This firmware will remain available at: http://repo.onioniot.com/omega2/images/openwrt-22.03/

But our future development efforts will be on the OpenWRT 23.05-based firmware!

What’s Next?

You tell us what you’d like to see and we’ll do our best to make it happen

We currently are working on the following:

Some new hardware is on the horizon - more news on that soon!
We’re going to continue working on the documentation and firmware based on your feedback
At some point later this year or early next year, new Omega devices will ship with the OpenWRT 23.05-based firmware - we will give advance notice before this happens!

EDIT Oct 18, 2024: fixed issue with broken links in post
EDIT Nov 8, 2024: added warning to try out new firmware on small scale first