RT-AC68U AiMesh blank Topology screen

[synare]

T-Mobile CellSpot converted to RT-AC68U with firmware 3.0.0.4.386_51665.

I've had no trouble using AiMesh with 6 other RT-AC68U's but a used one I recently picked up is showing a blank screen for the AiMesh->Topology tab and also can't be added as a node. It works fine when set put in wireless router mode, just not the AiMesh parts.

Has anyone seen anything like this? Any non-obvious setting to enable AiMesh?

 

[bbunge]

SNBForums Policy on ASUS TM-AC1900 Conversion Discussion

Further discussion of methods to get around ASUS' lockdown of TM-AC1900 firmware to prevent conversion to RT-AC68U will not be allowed. The main discussion thread has been deleted. Conversations related to defeating the lockdown have been deleted. New threads or Conversations opened on the...

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[Tech9]

but a used one I recently picked up is showing a blank screen

It depends on how the router was converted. Not all the methods I've seen posted online achieve positive results.

 

[bennor]

SNBForums Policy on ASUS TM-AC1900 Conversion Discussion

Further discussion of methods to get around ASUS' lockdown of TM-AC1900 firmware to prevent conversion to RT-AC68U will not be allowed. The main discussion thread has been deleted. Conversations related to defeating the lockdown have been deleted. New threads or Conversations opened on the...

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Note RMerlin's recent post to that thread:

After discussing it with @thiggins, we agreed that at this point, considering this device has long been EOL, it was time to drop this rule. If people can find ways to avoid TM-AC1900 from ending up as e-waste, then it's a Good Thing, and as this is an 8 years old device, I doubt either T-Mobile or Asus would complain.

That being said, one thing stays unchanged: that device is NOT support by Asuswrt-Merlin, and anyone trying to get things to work on it is entirely on their own, as I won't waste my time (or the community's time) trying to help people figure out issues that are caused by Asus's undisclosed protection measures they might have in place.

I will be unsticking this thread inf a few days.

 

[bennor]

@synare, what troubleshooting steps have you tried? Have you tried performing a hard factory reset then a manual reconfiguration (do not upload a saved router cfg file)?

 

[synare]

Solved:

A hard factory reset and then reloading 3.0.0.4_386_51665 still resulted in a blank Topology screen but it did encourage me to put more time into this and start from scratch.

I ended up putting the router in recovery mode, loading TM-AC1900_3.0.0.4_376_1703-g0ffdbba.trx to bring it back to T-Mobile form and then used the steps from lazymocha.com to first upload 3.0.0.4.376_3626, then added AiMesh with 3.0.0.4_386_40558, and then finally brought it up to date with 3.0.0.4_386_51665.

The device now shows the full Topology screen and also can be added as an AiMesh node.

Thanks for the help!