The Wi-Fi that would not show up

I was running OpenWrt on an Orange Pi Zero 3 using an image someone else had built. Everything worked except one thing: the Wi-Fi page in LuCI was empty. The hardware was there, but the interface would not show it.

Finding where it broke

The board's Wi-Fi chip is a Unisoc UWE5622 (AW859A) — not a chip with mature OpenWrt support. The problem turned out to be layered: the driver, the firmware, and a device tree that did not describe the hardware correctly.

The specific reason the LuCI page stayed empty was .dump_station. Without that implementation, LuCI has no way to ask the driver about client status, so the Wi-Fi page has nothing to render even while the radio is up.

The process was tedious

Debugging at this level means building an image, flashing it, booting the board, looking at the result, and starting over. There is no shortcut — every guess costs a full cycle.

What came out

A driver, firmware, and device tree patch that make the Wi-Fi work, plus a .dump_station implementation so the LuCI Wi-Fi page finally fills in. All of it is on GitHub, so the next person with the same board does not have to repeat the same cycle.

And since I was already in there, I built my own LuCI theme.