Network Everywhere NWR04B: serial port || firmware info
25 Jan 2005I've put in a few hours tonight working on the Network Everywhere NWR04B, with mixed results. (The NWRO04B is the 802.11b router I picked up for $18 on sale; I'm trying to duplicate this guy's luck getting Linux to work on the thing.
I took the time tonight to get a slightly more permanent version of the RS232 adapter put together. Previously I've been putting stuff together on a breadboard, with wires all over the place; tonight I soldered things together and put wires all over the place. I tried to be careful, and all the connections seemed good, but I still had no luck: I saw absolutely nothing over the serial port at all, and from what I've read it should be pretty damned obvious. I'll have to ask some people at work about this.
One thing I'm still trying to figure out is how to treat all the different ground connections; I'm assuming that they all get connected together, and together with pin 5 on the DB9 connector, but I'm not sure. (If anyone's got any hints, please chip in.) That was about two hours tonight, and if that was it I'd chalk it up to experience and go to bed. But I did manage to find this page, which had a Perl script which extracts GZip archives from files. And guess what? It works on the NWR04B firmware! Woohoo!
It's embarrassing how simple this script is; I've been trying to
figure out some way of doing exactly this, once I'd figured out that
there was an archive in there. I want to understand how this
works, but in the meantime it's exciting (hoo, what a life) to see all
the stuff in there. strings | fmt | less
shows tons of stuff going
on: HTML, a reference to /dev/uart0
, clitask
(some kind of
command-line interface, or just a dirty joke?), an XML UPNP
description of the device...all sorts of information. And that's
enough for now. I've got just enough energy to eat something, then go
to bed.
6 Comments
From: Caleb Bell
04-January-2006-23:27:16
So would this allow one to upload thrid party firmware to the device? Does anyone know if firmware for a linksys WRT54G would work on this device? I want to turn the NWRO04B into an access point so I can connect another wireless router to it. Either that or enable wireless bridging.
Thanks
From: Saint Aardvark
05-January-2006-07:04:07
Hi Caleb -- some answers for you:
So would this allow one to upload thrid party firmware to the
device?
Yes. There's a list on this page of
firmware for routers that have different names, but the same
underlying hardware. Most seems to work better than the original
firmware from Network Everywhere.
Also, this is how I'm uploading my own
firmware to the router.
Does anyone know if firmware for a linksys WRT54G would work
on this device?
It would not. The WRT54G uses a MIPS processor, while the NWR04B uses
an ARM processor. Even other routers that do use the same
CPU have a different bootloader, which means you won't be able to
easily use their firmware on the NWR04B (different checksum, probably
different starting address at boot time, etc).
I want to turn the NWRO04B into an access point so I
can connect another wireless router to it. Either that or enable
wireless bridging.
You and me both. I'm working
on getting Linux working on this, but it's a long project -- I've
never done this sort of thing before, and I'm learning as I go along.
Right now I've got a shell on the router and one ethernet interface
running -- that's it. No wireless yet, I'm still figuring out how to
get all five interfaces running, and I can't write to the flash memory
from Linux yet.
If you want to join in the fun, feel free! You can download (almost)
everything you need here.
I really need to put up some sort of "About the NWR04B" page...
From: Kyle Worwood
12-July-2005-11:04:51
Just bought this router off my buddy for $50. I think i got ripped off but oh well. thats life. Haventeven hooked it up yet just checkin it out online.Im a heavy downloader so i hope it can handle it.
From: Hugh Redelmeier
27-January-2005-12:26:49
I've got one of these routers. Cheap. A year ago. Unfortunately, it is unreliable -- not a very good DHCP client. And the support site's firmware hasn't been updated for two years. So I hope you produce something nice and spiffy.
From a hacking standpoint, the lack of an MMU and the small memory resources are limiting. The Linksys Wireless-G Router w/ SpeedBooster (WRT54GS) seems to be a current favourite.
Too bad you are the other side of the country. Otherwise I'd try to borrow your RS232 adapter (once you got it working).
From: Saint Aardvark
28-January-2005-06:41:18
Yeah, the WRT54G would be great -- but unfortunately, they're not on sale for $18. :-)
Thanks for the encouragement!
From: pck
30-January-2005-12:07:55
Hey, I just picked up one of these routers also. I'd be interested in finding out what you've figured out for this thing! My electronics skills are good, but my Linux skills are rusty. Shoot me an email if you're interested in colaborating efforts.
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