After finding out the model of your Raspberry Pi, the correct version of OpenWrt firmware can be determined. Download the firmware, flash it to an SD card and you are ready to give your RPi a new life as a modern, flexible router.

As an example, we are going to use Raspberry Pi 3B.

Download the firmware

Open the page containing the links to firmware files for each RPi model. Find your RPi model from the Installation table and click on the link pointing to the firmware file.

At the time of writing, the firmware for Raspberry Pi 3B is in

openwrt-22.03.3-bcm27xx-bcm2710-rpi-3-ext4-factory.img.gz

From the ending gz it can be deduced that the file is compressed. To extract it, go to the folder into which you downloaded the compressed file. How to extract the file depends on your operating system.

• Windows: use 7-Zip
• Linux (including Raspberry Pi OS):
  • open a File Manager of your choice, find the file, right-click on it, and select Extract, or,
  • use a terminal and type gzip -d filename.gz
• Mac: open a terminal and type gunzip filename.gz