• How to flash the Torch router with pcWRT

    What you need:

    1. Download the firmware image from here. MD5 checksum: e2f1bb281dd9f78cd603faf515491548.
    2. A TFTP server. You can use PumpKIN if you don’t have a favorite one. Download the appropriate binary for your operating system.

     

    The steps (using Windows as example below).

    1. Configure your Ethernet address: open Windows network center, click “Change adapter settings”. Find the Ethernet adapter and change the IP v4 properties. Set the IP address to 192.168.99.8 and subnet mask to 255.255.255.0.

    2. Configure Windows firewall: make sure Windows firewall allows PumpKIN through.
    3. Start PumpKIN, make sure “Server is running” is checked at the lower right corner.
    4. Set PumpKIN TFTP download path. Assume that you downloaded the firmware binary to the “Downloads” folder, then set the PumpKIN download path to the same folder.
    5. Connect your computer to the LAN port on the Torch router.
    6. Press and hold the Reset button on the Torch router (you may need to use a pin), then connect the power cable. Keep holding the Reset button for about 5 seconds, then let go.
    7. The Torch router will try to download firmware from your PC. You’ll see a prompt for you to grant the download in PumpKIN. Click Grant Access.
    8. Wait for about 5 minutes. If you can see the pcwrt and pcwrt_5g WiFi signals, then you’ve successfully flashed the router!

28 Responses so far.

  1. danstoner says:

    I can confirm that this works!!!!!!

    Thank you pcWRT!

    I had a little trouble with the tftp part (doing this on my Linux computer) but got it working and wrote down my process here:

    http://thatlinuxbox.com/blog/article.php/dont-trash-your-torch-router-yet

    Thanks again!

  2. PapaPep says:

    Works well! I really appreciate it! So far the only think I’ve run into is a message stating that parental controls are not supported on this router.

  3. admiraltk says:

    Thanks for the info on this. I was just about to throw out the Torch. Now that I have successfully flashed it with pcWRT, I would like to use the Torch as a WAP on my existing network. What settings do I use to turn my pcWRT enabled Torcch into a WAP? Thanks

  4. royvella says:

    I know this is an old string but does anyone have tips on how to do this via a Mac? Thought I could work it out and it appears that Pumpkin’s putting the bin file onto the router but it’s not flashing it for whatever reason… strange. Thought? Thanks.

    • trecowan says:

      Just followed the instructions above for my Mac, and was successful in resetting it! I’m not familiar with PCWRT, so I’m now digging around for how to configure my old Torch router.

  5. Steve says:

    Guest wifi does work but it’s only the 5Ghz network.
    Thanks for the firmware!

  6. canman says:

    I successfully flashed my Torch router with PCWRT, however, both on WiFi as well as a wired connection, the maximum download speed is 2.5mbps. When I connect directly from my modem to PC I get a consistent 135mbps. Is this normal because it is an alternative firmware? Any suggestions on what I should do to fix this issue?

    • pcwrt says:

      It’s not normal. The router should be able to deliver close to 1 Gbps wired, if your Internet speed is that high. You may try an isolated test with iperf, or hook it up to a different network and test.

  7. ugvenkat says:

    canman how did you flash it, I am running into issues, even after flashing, it still shows WIFI has Torch-002-FOK, so it did not take PCWRT.

  8. mfaulkner says:

    Once the firmware is updated to pc-wrt, are further firmware updates supported?

  9. canman says:

    I stored my Torch router in a box for about 10 months because it started running very slowly again.

    I re-flashed following the guide, and the unit is functional, but the highest ↓/↑ speeds I have been able to get is about 16mbps. I am confused by why I am having this problem again and what I can do to fix it.

    Is there some type of log I can provide that could help someone troubleshoot this for me? Or, is it possible to use a different firmware version, such as the base openwrt that this pcwrt version is based on?

    • canman says:

      I just did some more troubleshooting and found that I can get up to about 400mbps between my laptop and another computer on my LAN, but once I go out to an internet page, I drop to between 10-16mbps at the most. Very frustrating πŸ™

    • canman says:

      BTW, all of this is the max I have been getting with a wired connection. WiFi is even slower, but I figured fixing the one will help the other.

    • canman says:

      UPDATE: By configuring the router as a ‘Dumb AP’ according to the OpenWRT guidelines at: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dumbap I was able to get consistent WiFi speeds in excess of 200 Mbps. However, wired connection speeds have slowed to a crawl of about 1Mbps.

    • canman says:

      UPDATE: When the Ethernet cable is connected to the LAN port on the router, WiFi speeds are great! However, when connected to the ‘WAN’ port, speeds are dismal. I used the Luci GUI to delete the WAN interface and made sure that both WiFi and both Ethernet ports were all bridged under the same LAN interface, but that did not make a difference to the speeds available through the ‘WAN’ port.

    • pcwrt says:

      We did some basic testing when we worked on the firmware. There was no problem with wired connection between the LAN and WAN ports. And download speed with wireless connection was good too. Upload speed with wireless connection was slow. But the wireless driver we used was the open source driver that comes with OpenWrt.

  10. oleg_kh says:

    Hi, does anyone have the original firmware (version 1.5.4 is mentioned on the Kickstarter website), I have 2 routers, one I bought with pcWRT already installed, and the second was in a sealed box. The first one works, and on the second I can’t connect to the Internet in any way. I connected through the paths to both and saved the u-boot sections, I saw that on the first, it is 1,4,0,1 and on that in the packed box 1,3,0,1. I suspect that this is exactly my problem, because I want to upgrade to the latest original firmware so that the u-boot bootloader is updated, and then flash pcWRT.
    I want to try creating OpenWRT for our router, but so far I have not succeeded.

  11. satelliteseeker says:

    I’m currently working on a port of OpenWrt 21.02 to Torch and has successfully built a sysupgrade image:

    https://github.com/satelliteseeker/openwrt/tree/torch-21.02.1

    Now I am looking for the correct way to create a factory image for Torch router to accept through TFTP. Does it require any extra header or checksum when building the image?

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