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Taking Apart An Airport Extreme Base Station
Farley Mullet writes "As seen on MacSlash, here is a link to page documenting one man's dissection of an Airport Extreme Base Station. It's pretty neat to see what Apple crammed in there, including (gasp!) a chip from AMD!"
You wouldn't have to buy the entire Airport base station. Apple sells Mini-PCI Airport Extreme cards seperately for 99$ at the Apple store here. However, it is questionable whether there are any drivers for non-Mac systems.
Actually from my recollection it is quite the other way around. AMD started out making a myriad of devices and then shifted focus to the desktop processor industry.
In other terms, they were running around town at night but lately they have settled down. Bully for them, I dig it.
I actually am working on an embedded project that uses the Alchemy AU1500 chip, as used in the AirPort. I can tell you that getting Linux running on this AirPort would be trivial. All you need to do is break out the EJTAG pins on the AU1500, and connect it to a Raven EJTAG adapter (works under Linux + GDB).
The next thing you'd need to figure out are the SDRAM and flash timings.
What I would really like to see: someone should get Linux running out of the connected RAM, and then extract the contents of the Flash chip. I'm really curious what OS the AirPort uses. If it's something we're familiar with, then it might be easy to reverse engineer the driver for the BroadCom peripheral. I would *LOVE* to see drivers for these BroadCom devices.
The AU1500 has excellent support and is a superb microcontroller; take at www.linux-mips.org . Integrated USB, Ethernet, serial, very fun! If someone wants to send me an AirPort, I'll put Linux on it ! :)
FWIW, Apple have been using AMD chips through their machines for quite a while. I have dozens of older macs, from early powermacs back through quadras and mac II machines, and there are several AMD chips on some of those boards. They're not doing anything but auxiliary functions such as serial port controllers and the like, but they're there all the same
We're not afraid to do that either, but the outlets have to be of a specific type, isolated with internal transformers to step down the voltage, and mounted in a certain way, up high, away from any water. Added to this is the fact that all UK appliances are fused and virtually all are grounded. The large 3rd pin on uk mains plugs is the earth and all uk plugs have an internal fuse rated to match the appliance ( untill the owner changes it for the wrong rating, but there only so much you can do ).
So in the case of your hair dryer not only would it be grounded to prevent an electric shock, but the fuse in the plug would blow cutting off the supply without fusing the entire house's electrics.
The reason that the american, and other flat 2 pin plugs, tend to fall out easily is the way they are retained. The holes in the pins are for a sprung copper contact wiper inside the socket that has a detent bump moulded into it to match the hole, providing a away for the plug to be retained. Over time the wipers lose their spring and the detent becomes less and less effective, allowing the plug to fall out easily.