So the last time I purchased a new wireless router – I tried to find a wireless router that had a future – something where I could replace the stock firmware once the software updates stopped coming from the manufacture. But by this time linksys had sold its soul and stopped shipping wireless routers with the serial headers – my EA6350v2 was one such of these, prior to attempting to solder on pins or making a clothespin serial doohickey, I purchased a backup EA6350v2 off ebay so I wouldn’t have to repeat the cycle if I botched the job. Fortunately the backup EA6350v2 had the serial port pins so I was able to get ddwrt going with out too much fuss. However a few weeks in the wifi was behaving funky on this backup 6350v2 so I went looking for another router – I was looking for a new/better linksys router but came across this sentence: as of October 2020, WE CANNOT ENDORSE BUYING A EA8500 ANYMORE – as linksys has started making it even harder to get alternate firmware installed. So I picked up a Netgear r6300v2, cracked the case, loaded recent version of ddwrt via serial port and added linksys to my never list.