• Someone who relocated office recently was so kind to donate their three Ubiquity UniFi AP PRO units to me while they upgraded to a Ruckus system in their new office.
• Knowing that Ubiquity hardware are famous for the ease which you can replace the vendor's proprietary firmware with OpenWrt I was very eager to see how these dual radio nodes will live along the nodes from other hardware vendors in my existing mesh.
• I must admit that the whole exercise turned out to be much smoother and faster than I envisioned.
• Read on to follow my quick journey…

Here is the steps to take when flashing the MESHdesk firmware onto the Ubiquiti hardware.

• We will use our Windows machine and a small GUI utility program called tftp2.exe to flash the new firmware onto the hardware.
• You will find a link to download this program on this URL: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/TFTP_flash#Windows

• Next you can grab the pre-build MESHdesk firmware for the Ubiquiti Unifi AP PRO from this URL: https://sourceforge.net/projects/radiusdesk/files/MESHdesk/Firmware/Ubiquiti/
• Since this is a new install of OpenWrt we will use the openwrt-ar71xx-generic-ubnt-uap-pro-squashfs-factory image.

• When the Ubiquiti is in TFTP flash mode it will run a small TFTP server that listens on 192.168.1.20 on the hardware.
• In order for our Windows machine to transfer the firmware to the Ubiquiti we will assign the IP of 192.168.1.200 to the LAN port of the machine.

• In order to put the Ubiquity hardware in TFTP flash mode you simply have to push the reset button down and keep it down while powering the hardware up.
• After 15-25 seconds it will show you it is in TFPT flash mode by flashing the LEDs in a rotating fashion (White, Blue and then off etc)
• Now you can fire up the tftp2.exe utility; select the file and flash it onto the device.
• The whole flash process is magnitudes faster when comparing to the time it takes on the Picostation for instance.
• As soon as the white LED stopped flashing rapidly you can disconnect the power and do to the next steps:
  • Point the mesh node to the MESHdesk server
  • Add the mesh node to the existing mesh network

• We are not going to duplicate existing documentation but will rather point you to the following dedicated page about the MESHdesk Node Config utility.
• http://www.radiusdesk.com/user_guide/md_firmware#configuring_the_firmware

• Here is a bit of a heads-up. The Ubiquiti UniFi AP PRO are dual radio units so when we add them; we need to specify which radio we want to use and for what.
• Here is also a second heads-up. On the Ubiquiti UniFi AP PRO we have the 5G radio as Radio0 and the 2.4G radio as Radio1. This is different from the default
• See the following screenshot:

• Now that the nodes are pointing to our MESHdesk controller and the MESHdesk controller knows about our nodes we have many vendors one mesh.

VS

• Here is a point of interest when one compare the TP-Link WDR3500 to the Ubiquiti UniFi AP PRO.
• Hardware wise they seem to be pretty much the same. (Aside from the 3dBm higher power on the radios of the Ubiquiti)

• Price

• Note the listed price from Scoop (R2,495.00) is excluding VAT thus with VAT which is 14% we go up to R2844.30.
• The price from Scoop also is a dealer price and exclude delivery.
• The Takealot price include free delivery to your door.

The cost of the Ubiquiti UniFi PRO AP is at least four times higher than that of the TP-Link WDR3500 while offering more or less the same hardware.