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Hardware for OpenWrt

wrtnode.com

21–30 of 61 posts

Re: Hardware for OpenWrt

#21

I'm sorry to bust the fun on this, but I would never rebuild this device (or anything other with radio capability)... simply because of the costs of certification which is mandatory for any RF transmitter.

I don't think that's the point. The problem with a lot of home automation and internet-of-things stuff is proprietary lock in, either from new young companies that could be dead in 18 months or established monsters looking to slurp your data. Having an open source foundation is the only viable long term approach to something that needs to live as long as your home infrastructure. If this lot cease being able to make…

Isn't standard commercial hardware tat you can install opernwrt enough?

Re: Hardware for OpenWrt

#22
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the point. The problem with a lot of home automation and internet-of-things stuff is proprietary lock in, either from new young companies that could be dead in 18 months or established monsters looking to slurp your data. Having an open source foundation is the only viable long term approach to something that needs to live as long as your home infrastructure. If this lot cease being able to make…

Isn't standard commercial hardware tat you can install opernwrt enough?

Not at all. All successful end user platforms contain provisions for the easy installation of commercially sold software, including at the point of purchase. Tying yourself to OpenWRT prevents this.

This is the real reason the GPL has a sort of built in success limit for end user deployments, and why so much of the code in Android is Apache or BSD licensed.

Re: Hardware for OpenWrt

#23
post #4

A fun comparison: 20 years ago you could spend a large number of dollars (anyone remember how much?) on a dreamy Silicon Graphics Indigo2 Unix workstation. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indigo%C2%B2_and_Challenge_... its specs included: * MIPS CPUs ranging from the the R4000 to the R10000, with clock rates of up to 250MHz. (This project uses a related MIPS CPU that clocks at 600MHz.) * Up to 512Mb of RAM, equ…

> * 100Mbit/s wired Ethernet network interface (this project provides 802.11n wireless networking, which Wikipedia claims will reach 600Mbit/s).

This project has 2x 100Mbps wired Ethernets in addition to 300Mbps WiFi.

edit:

> * Up to 512Mb of RAM, equal to that in this project. The Wikipedia articles explains that the Indigo2 hardware could theoretically support 1Gb of RAM, but the thermal output of the DRAM available at the time was too great for the enclosure.

As user Wicher below notes, there seems to be bit/byte confusion here. So Indigo has still significantly more memory than this project.

Re: Hardware for OpenWrt

#26
It seems unusual to pick a Mediatek SoC, if the goal is open source compatibility. It would have made much more sense to go with an Atheros SoC and Atheros modems, which can be used with no proprietary binaries whatsoever.

Re: Hardware for OpenWrt

#28
post #3
post #2

This looks very useful, but price, RAM and flash sizes are not readily apparent. Am I missing something?

Can't find price but http://wrtnode.com/tech-specs.html says 512M RAM and 128M flash

512Mbit ram (so 64MB)

witness RAM part number here: http://wrtnode.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/DSC_0038.jpg http://wrtnode.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/DSC_0046.jpg http://wrtnode.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2s.jpg

decode here: http://www.elixir-memory.com/Download/2007%201H.pdf

Very likely the 128M flash is 128Mb, so 16MB

Re: Hardware for OpenWrt

#29

I'm sorry to bust the fun on this, but I would never rebuild this device (or anything other with radio capability)... simply because of the costs of certification which is mandatory for any RF transmitter.

Can you clarify what you mean here? Are you saying that certification would be required to build this device in the U.S. (not sell or market it)?

If so, this is incorrect. There is no FCC certification required for low-powered, non-licensed devices like this one if you don't sell or market them. You can run up to 5 such devices without any certication. See page 3 on:

http://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Doc...

Re: Hardware for OpenWrt

#30
post #17
post #8

Is OpenWRT safe to use? The latest release, at least according to https://openwrt.org , was in April 2013. I'm not intimately familiar with what software packages it uses, but it seems like it could, at the very least, be vulnerable to Heartbleed.

OpenWRT's OpenSSL package has been updated to 1.0.1g, so it's not vulnerable to Heartbleed. The default install doesn't use OpenSSL so there is no need to update the install images.

Additionally, many packages can use alternate, embedded focused SSL libraries (PolarSSL, etc.) that will also ship with OpenWRT.
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