A New Port – GL-MT6000

A whole year has now passed since I first announced the Tomato64 project. I’d like to thank all those who have tried it out, to all those who are using it, to those who have given bug reports and feedback, and to those who have given monetarily in support of the project.  Honestly it has been a very fun and gratifying hobby for myself.

Earlier this year (or was it last year?) I saw a lot of hype around a soon-to-be released wifi router from GL.iNet, the GL-MT6000 (Flint 2).  Looking at the specs it seems like something that would be a worthy successor to the current line of Tomato supported wifi routers. It’s also (fairly) affordable compared to similar routers, and can be even be found on sale for less quite often. Even better, it shipped with a fork of OpenWrt and had excellent Open Source support.  I immediately punched in my credit card info and ordered an early bird model.  I was very excited when it arrived. I played around with it for a bit, and then I let it sit in the corner for a large portion of this year.  Tomato64 on x86_64 was still demanding a lot of my spare time.  Finally I called up a good friend who had some soldering skills. I asked him to solder on some pin headers to serial access to the device.  We were ecstatic 20 minutes later when we got it working.

With serial access I got to work on porting Tomato.  The new and unique Tomato64 build system, based on the buildroot project, proved to make (relatively) easy work of it.  Within a month’s time I had Tomato running on the GL-MT6000. At this point it (should) have feature parity with its x86_64 counterpart. At the time of writing there is no Wifi gui yet, but it is possible to create complex wifi setups following this wiki guide. I think this will cover the majority of use cases for Tomato users.

However, this is only the beginning. I have ambitious plans for this router, and perhaps a few never-before-seen features.  Thanks for going on this journey with me!