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Taking Apart An Airport Extreme Base Station

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the gettin-all-up-and-inside-that dept.

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!"

1 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Airport - Laptop by baitisj2 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Yes, they mean 1.2 watts.

    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 ! :)