openWRT - BT Home Hub 5 how to install

There are plenty of tutorials out in the internet with extensive explanation about the pros and cons of installing openWRT in a home router.

This tutorial is to meant to grab only the relevant steps of the installation process :

Pinout for the TTL to USB Connection

The table below is very important cause a common mistake will be to connect the TX to TX and RX to RX, however it is the opposite.

Pin No.USB Serial to TTL AdapterWire ColourHome Hub Connection Point
 1n/aWhite boot_sel2 / R45 Pad
 2n/an/a GND / Use the USB socket ground/case pin
 3TXGreen RX / R78 Pad
 4RXRed TX  / R77 Pad
 5GNDn/a GND / Use the ground plane connection of the capacitor

Turn on the device with boot_sel2 connected to GND and as soon as you see the terminal output below disconnect it from ground.

Type [C-a] [C-h] to see available commands
Terminal ready

ROM VER: 1.1.4
CFG 04
UART

And, follow this tutorial to upload the modifed boot loader image to the router.

It's been a bit of trouble to set the TFTP server on my linux distro.

A service was already running on port 69 and preventing tftpd-hpa to start and it had to be stopped :

service inetutils-inetd stop

External Links

Installing LEDE/OpenWRT on a BT Home Hub 5 / Plusnet One Router - Programming with Fahad
Installing LEDE/OpenWRT on a BT Home Hub 5 / Plusnet One Router A Step by step guide to instal LEDE/OpenWRT operating system on a BT Home Hub 5 /
Installing OpenWrt 19.07.3 on BT Homehub 5A
After moving into a new property a few months ago, the drawbacks of using the ISP supplied firmware included on my router rapidly started to become apparent.