A5-V11 : Overwrite OEM(qualcomm) firmware with Openwrt Image

Here are few steps to overwrite OEM firmware of a5-v11 router with openwrt.

1) Prepare a FAT formatted USB-Flash-Drive and unzip this a5-v11-openwrt.zip to USB-Flash-Drive. (Important: do not just copy a5-v11-openwrt.zip to flash-drive, unzip this file to USB-Flash-Drive, this folder contains openwrt-factory.bin with needed boot-loader and update scripts)

2) Prepare this setup as shown in the picture below.


3) After appying +5v power to a5-v11, RED-LED on this router stays ON for few seconds, and then BLUE-LED starts blinking (from power-ON to blinking-blue-led-state, it takes about 1minute)

4) By this time, your PC would get the ip in the range of 192.168.100.x from the a5-v11's dhcp server.

5) Ensure that your a5-v11 has qualcomm firmware by looking at the web-UI of this router.

NOTE: Do not continue incase if your router's web-page is different than the one shown above(Qualcomm), you might have received another variant having chinese firmware, Instructions for overwriting the chinese firmware are given in my other blog.

6) telnet to the a5-v11 using putty.exe(or telnet command) as shown below.

6) Run the following commands as shown in the picture below7) After rebooot, wait for a minute, this time, openwrt firmware would boot on a5-v11, and your PC would get the ip in the range of 192.168.1.x8)If everything goes well, your browser would show the following webUI of openwrt.

9) As shown above, follow step-1 and 2 to login with default root user.10) After login you will see following page,

11) you can overwrite openwrt firmware with your own openwrt-variant by clicking on menu system=>Backup/Flash Firmware as shown in the picture above.Have Fun hacking your a5-v11 with opensource firmware!!!