I’ve got a new E750v2 test device and wanted to flash openwrt. It seems like the sock gl.inet Firmware for the E750v2 has a few different packages installed than the ones on the github repository. Seems like there are a few references in the mcu package for the oled screen which are missing on the e750-mcu package I found on github.
Reason for installing stock openwrt is that I want a debloated device to maximize battery life. Seems like the stock gl.inet firmware uses quite a lot of cpu in idle: (webui closed, connected via ethernet)
root@GL-E750:~# uptime
22:30:27 up 19 min, load average: 1.35, 1.54, 1.35
Stock openwrt (but without a working oled screen) gets almost down to 0 in idle and you can feel that the device is A LOT cooler.
What’s the best way to get a clean OpenWRT (I just need cellular+wifi+wireguard in luci) on the E750v2?
Thanks for the warning!
To be honest the most critical thing for me is to have a battery indication one the oled screen. I can work around everything else, but without any indication about the battery status it gets a little bit tricky to use the device.
If there is any Idea how to get the oled screen to display battery information that would be great!
Thanks!
I haven’t used the MCU package, but I did try directly interacting with it via the serial port. I was able to set a custom display message by doing this:
According to the github page, you should be able to read the battery status from the MCU as well, though I haven’t tried. By combining that with the arbitrary write, it might be possible to write a little cron script that would write ‘Battery: 99%’ or something to the screen once per minute.
For everyone interested in full control of OLED and battery status on vanilla OpenWrt 23.05, I've created small script intended to run in background and update display every minute. Script have dependencies, but they all are packaged, so you won't need to fiddle with OpenWrt build system to have all features.