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Comment by qmarchi | Hacker News Reader

In case anyone wants it, here's how to root a TP-Link OnHub. They're essentially glorified chromebooks, with some magic sauce on them.

https://www.exploitee.rs/index.php/Rooting_The_Google_OnHub

Dis: Googler, not near Nest/Home

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A quick search suggest there's no WRT firmware for the device. That's a pity, OnHub has 1G ram and I can imaging a lot of creative usages if WRT firmware is available.

It's likely expecting to boot from a custom vendor kernel, even after being placed in "developer mode" - which is probably why the "rooting" procedure is so involved. Look, I get that this has a nice amount of RAM and all, but a lot of this random IoT junk is just not worth supporting.

There's some nice bits of hardware in there. Notably, there's a Zigbee radio, so getting OpenWRT and running Home Assistant is totally a possibility.

If anyone is reading this and has an OnHub they want to donate, just hit up the OpenWRT dev mailing list and offer it to existing devs. The OnHub is an ipq806x device and should be easy to support.

They can be had for 10-20 bucks on fb marketplace

Would rooting allow reconfiguration that Google will now be blocking through the Home app?

Yes

Thanks-- That's promising then. An easy tool to root & non-techie friendly GUI would be a great thing here. Heck, they seem like a nice piece of hardware on their spec's, I'd pickup a few on the cheap.

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