It’s been a really long time since I’ve been involved with embedded computers, since about 2000/2001 when I worked with EMJ America ( now WDL Systems) a company specializing in that kind of thing. The other day while rambling the net, which I do a lot of these days, I came across a group that figured out how to load Linux onto the Linksys WRT54G and WRT54GS and other wireless access points and home routers. They call it OpenWRT. Now it just so happens that I have a WRT54GS sitting in my closet.

An hour or so later:

It’s really pretty impressive when you think about it– for about $50 you get:

• 200 Mhz Mips processor (easily and safely OC’d to at least 240Mhz)
• 8 Mbs Ram
• 32 Mbs Flash
• 8 easily accessible GPIO lines
• Built in Ethernet and 802.llg wifi
• 2 Built in RS232 serial ports (easily converted to USB 1 with cheap cell phone cable and some soldering)

Which if you were to buy elsewhere would easily run you $200.

So what else can it do? Well I’m considering this mod that would allow me to increase storage with a SD card reader, but frankly I’m jsut thrilled that I get to mess about with iptables and real linux routing stuff. While the interface on my other wifi router (some cheap-o Netgear) allowed port forwarding this is way more useful in the long run.

While it would be fantastic to eventually serve all of my web pages from it, I don’t think the 8mbs of ram are up to the task of running a MySql server. Although I suppose I could modify WordPress to operate with SQLite…

Hmm…