I bought a TL-WR802N a few years ago and it was waiting in a drawer for the right moment when I needed to extend Internet into my garage for my wifi enabled electric vehicle charger.  I was not able to connect to the device using Tether or by using its DHCP-assigned address in a browser.  Both methods work with an RE205 which I have on the same router network.  Using a network monitor, I can see that upon powerup the device sends DHCP requests, gets an address, and responds properly to ARP requests, however it does not respond to a SYN request to establish a TCP connection.  It seems to me that the the unit must be in acceptable physical and firmware condition to get as far as it does but why can't I establish a TCP connection?

I hard reset a number of times with the same result.  The unit also does not respond to pings.  Other threads have suggested that the unit should be reachable through the static address192.168.0.1 after a hard reset but I don't find that to be true since it always starts executing the DHCP protocol after a hard reset.  For my network, it is always getting dynamic 192.168.1.7.

I know I should have tested the device when I first bought it but now I'm a bit obsessed with getting it to work because its size and low power are perfect for what I need.