Ubiquiti Announces RouterStation Challenge Winners

Riskable writes "Remember that $200,000 Contest For a Better Open-WRT Wireless Router GUI? Today Ubiquiti posted the winning entries to their support wiki. The grand prize was a tie between PyCI (written by yours truly) and NETSHe with OpenNET as the runner up. Source code and firmware images for each entry are available for download on their respective wiki pages. I'll be setting up a project page for PyCI (and l2sh) soon to make it a participatory open source product. Even if you don't have a RouterStation, or don't care about OpenWRT, there are numerous Python modules and tools inside of PyCI that could prove useful to other open source projects (e.g. iptables.py can read/interpret over 400 permutations of the iptables command). I'll also be checking the comments if anyone has any questions for me about PyCI or the contest in general. BTW: I'd like to thank all the commenters in the original article that insinuated that the technical requirements were impossible and/or that making a GUI to configure such complex things is a waste of time. I read every one and I wouldn't have made it such an obsession otherwise!"

Comments

Re:Screenshots?

[Riskable]

Yeah, I'm not sure why Ubiquiti chose to post so few screenshots of my entry (and they're really small). I posted a bunch (full-size) in my flickr photo stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/18175109@N00/tags/pyci/ (they're all tagged with "pyci").

It is the capabilities and innovation, silly

[Riskable]

I won't comment on the other entries since I haven't played around with them yet but I will say this: The primary advantage PyCI has over, say, LuCI, Tomato, DD-WRT, and X-WRT is that configuration screens in PyCI are infinitely configurable. When I say, "inifinitely configurable" I mean that all forms that can be dynamic are dynamic. For example, in Tomato and LuCI if you want to configure DNS you get two fields to enter that information (primary and secondary). In PyCI you can add as many as you want. There's examples of this all over the spectrum of configurable options.

Also, PyCI supports many features that the existing interfaces do not which is sort of the whole point of the contest. As another example, PyCI doesn't just let you configure firewall rules. It lets you configure your firewall rules and then see exactly which iptables command will be executed as the result of your changes.

My personal favorite unique feature of PyCI is the quake-style terminal. Even if PyCI doesn't have a configuration interface for something you can always just hit the ESC key to pull down a full terminal just as if you SSH'd into your router. It even works with full-screen apps like vi. I wrote a standalone version of it called Escape From The Web that can be downloaded here. It uses the Tornado framework instead of CherryPy (among some other differences) but from the user's perspective it is pretty much the same.

There's a whole lot of stuff included with PyCI that isn't covered in detail in the wiki. I plan to put up a downloadable x86 Qemu image with PyCI pre-installed for people to play with soon.