NWR04B: What next?
28 Aug 2005I've had a few questions about what I actually plan to do with this thing now that I can get a shell running. I've been thinking about this for a while, and here, in no particular order, is what I want to do: Network access: It'd be cool if SSH (preferred) or telnet would work on this. And hey, it'd be handy (okay, for certain values of "handy") to have a web server you could just plug in anywhere, especially if it was combined with a USB flash drive (see below). Get a filesystem embedded in flash: I went with NFS mounting the filesystem because I had no idea how to embed one in flash. I still don't, plus I'm unsure how this all interacts with the bootloader that's on there...my memory is a bit hazy at this point, but I think that the BL crapped out with a sufficiently large kernel at one point (maybe one I'd compiled with debugging?). The image I'm uploading now is 513KB, which leaves about 1.5MB of flash left for the filesystem. Since NFS works right now and has tons of room, I figure I can experiment 'til I figure out what I'm doing, then make an entirely self-contained image. Provide an image for other people to upload to their own routers: 'cos what good is doing all this if I can't share? There are a few other people with this router who have (I think) been following this, so there ought to be some small amount of interest in this. I'd like to do the same with the devel stuff -- at least have a nice tarball for Busybox, the kernel and an NFS filesystem, say. (If you're impatient, email me.) Make the world's first Beowulf cluster of wireless routers: 'cos I'd like my 15 minutes of fame, please. Slashdot, here I come! Turn it into a firewall/wireless access poing: This thing is small, doesn't consume much power, and is silent. It's got five ethernet ports and a wireless card with a GPL'd driver. How cool is that? A Linux firewall'd be nice and flexible, and it'd be nice to (say) only allow SSH/SSL on the wireless card. I'm curious to see how much additional memory firewall rules will take up, and if I can get something like tarpitting working on it without sucking up all the RAM. More hacks: This chip has 2 UARTS and USB. It'd be cool to, say, add a USB flash drive to this thing; I've got a 64MB one lying around that I used to get my XBox running Linux, and a 64MB filesystem would be huge compared to what I can fit in 1.5MB. What about breaking out the second UART to a serial port? Can we add more RAM? And the CPU can run at different clock speeds -- what happens if we play around with that?
3 Comments
From: Vincent
02-October-2005-10:17:38
A USB 1.1 client is a device that can connect to a USB host (typically a computer). Forget about plugging another client to that USB connection since the USB Specs does not provide a way to do peer to peer (client to client) communications. You need USBtoGo to do that, which is an extension to the USB protocol and so rare that it is usually printed everywhere on all devices supporting it...
From: Kevin
20-September-2005-18:22:59
You have listed as a hack the fact that the chip has USB. Which chip are you referring to and where do you get this information?
I have a NWR04B and hooked up the serial port. Before I make it completely unusable as a router I am interested in the potential. I have already install openwrt on a wr850g, cool, but no USB there.
From: Saint Aardvark
21-September-2005-20:15:01
The datasheet for the CPU sez it can be a USB 1.1 client. There's no interface on the router, so there'd have to be some soldering done at the very least...
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