Hello, I'm a bit new at this stuff so i've been trying to figure out how to get openwrt working on some routers i've managed to get my hands on.
I'm affiliated with an organization who is organizing "up-cycling" hacking sessions with a local middle school. We maintain close ties with the local UNI (my Alma mater) and got permission from the sysadmin to go through the tech waste disposal and take whatever we wanted. After loading up on broken ink-jets and other neat electro-mechanical junk i noticed a decent sized bin full of APs. Apparently the Network Operations guys are upgrading the campus wireless network and just dumping the APs. I grabbed two on the off chance that we might be able to do something with em, at the very least crack it open and talk about board layout a little or pull out some LEDs or LDOs or something. So, When i got a chance I cracked two of the routers open and was a little surprised. There are two models of routers, Large Square ones (Trapeze MP-82s) and small puck-shaped round ones (Nortel 2330). The Square had an Atheros AR7161 and two 66 pin TSSOP DDR SDRAMS with a serial-flash. In addition to this, There where pads for a USB Host port that wasn't populated. There was a rj-45 connector labeled "management interface" that sat behind a rs232 level shiftier so i think that's a serial port. There was also a 14 pin connector in the vicinity of the CPU that looks a lot like a MIPS-EJTAG-2.5 14-pin interface. Grounds in all the right places. I did a search and it looks like this SOC is quite popular but no openwrt port for this router. The puck had a Atheros AR5312A one TSSOP DDR SDRAM and a parallel NAND Flash. I powered the thing on via a "POE injector" and started poking around, I found what looks like a MIPS-EJTAG-2.5 connector with the grounds in the right places and a reset pin that resets the router when pulled low. And i found a 3.3v serial port that informs me that the device is quite confused and upset because the Ethernet link is not up and it can't phone home for firmware but it doesn't look like u-boot and has no prompt. pics of me bringing up the puck and pics of the square's PCB here. http://acamilo.tumblr.com/post/18833966874/wireless-router-fun-time So, me and some friends went back and took a whole bunch of both kinds and i'm going to try to get openwrt running on them 'cause it might be kind of fun to make a robot out of these. I've installed buildroot in a VM using the instructions on ( http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/buildroot.exigence) got make menuconvig going. selected "Target System (Atheros AR7xxx/AR9xxx) ---> " and i have my box chugging away running make -j 5 Since both of these boards and their supported cousins probably descent from the same reference designs How hard would it be to get these guys running. I've never done that before. Would you recommend trying to JTAG them with a similar router's u-boot and trying to boot over tftp? Do you have any pointers, tips?
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