OpenWrt Turns a $14 Card Reader Into the Smallest Wireless AP (livejournal.com)

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OpenWrt Turns a $14 Card Reader Into the Smallest Wireless AP (livejournal.com)

Posted by timothy on Tuesday January 26, 2016 @02:34AM from the latent-capabilities dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The Zsun Wifi card reader is a tiny micro SD card reader with WiFi connectivity. While people managed to access the device's serial console a few months ago, the plan was to eventually run OpenWrt since it's based on the popular Atheros AR9331 WiSoC combined with 64MB RAM and 16MB SPI Flash. A team of Polish hackers have managed this feat, and have now posted instructions to install OpenWrt, as well as other documentation: for example, a description of the board's GPIOs.

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Wrong link by 110010001000 · 2016-01-26 02:39 · Score: 5, Informative

The link for the instructions are: https://wiki.hackerspace.pl/pr... The link in the summary is just blogspam.
1. Re:Wrong link by Gaygirlie · 2016-01-26 03:45 · Score: 1
  
  My mind is already boggling with the possibilities, I think I'll be buying a few. I wish I had known about these things sooner than this, but, well, better late than never!
2. Re:Wrong link by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 04:59 · Score: 0
  
  I think I'll grab a few and sprinkle them around my house as repeaters.
  I'm not sure if one would be powerful enough to act as a web server. I'm currently using an old dual core smartphone with 512MB RAM for that purpose.
3. Re:Wrong link by Gaygirlie · 2016-01-26 05:04 · Score: 1
  
  Depends on the content you'd use it to serve. If you were thinking of serving dynamic webpages, like e.g. PHP-generated content, it would barely be useable by one client at a time, but for mostly-static content it'd work just peachy. The AR9331 is a single-core SoC and 64MB RAM doesn't allow for much caching to be done, so it would be a lot more limited than your smartphone.
4. Re:Wrong link by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 07:17 · Score: 0
  
  That is the issue I was considering. I am running some server side scripts, but not anything really heavy. I'll have to give it a shot and see how it works. After all, I remember running a web server with PHP and Perl scripts on hardware that was significantly older (ie. Pentium with 32 or 64MB RAM) and it worked fine.
5. Re:Wrong link by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 09:36 · Score: 0
  
  What type of throughput with the wireless can be expected?
  I'm not seeing that information listed anywhere.
6. Re:Wrong link by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 10:18 · Score: 0
  
  The Atheros AR9331 is capable of 802.11 b/g/n at up to 150Mbps.
7. Re:Wrong link by greenfruitsalad · 2016-01-26 10:24 · Score: 1
  
  will you walk around shopping malls with an open access point with a captive portal that redirects any url requests to a locally stored goatse picture? naughty naughty...
Nice and small by Midnight+Thunder · 2016-01-26 03:15 · Score: 2

Cool that they were able to do something extra with this small device. The next step would be having this support a kernel image from the SD card, so the non-hardware hackers amongst us can do other cool stuff. Either way I am curious to know what uses people end up putting it to, beyond the suggested.

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1. Re:Nice and small by Gaygirlie · 2016-01-26 03:27 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Why would you need to be a hardware-hacker to use these? You can just use telnet or any of the other vulnerabilities they found to access the device's internals via software and proceed from there to install OpenWRT-proper.
2. Re:Nice and small by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 04:31 · Score: 0
  
  it would seem that connecting wires is considered hardware hacking. Maybe there are some with a phobia of wires.
3. Re:Nice and small by Midnight+Thunder · 2016-01-26 07:29 · Score: 1
  
  I had understood there was an element of soldering and de-soldering involved.
  
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4. Re:Nice and small by Darinbob · 2016-01-26 09:06 · Score: 1
  
  It doesn't really seem that small overall. 64MB RAM with 16MB flash is not tiny in the home router world where OpenWRT, DD-WRT, and the like are popular. It's tiny in physical size only.
$14 is a conservative price by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 03:47 · Score: 0

Many Aliexpress sellers have them for under $11. I bought 3 for $30.50 and free shipping to the US (so about $10.17/each).
1. Re:$14 is a conservative price by Dagger2 · 2016-01-26 06:24 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  It's $14 if you buy it via the blog author's dx.com affiliate link. Or slightly less if you switch to one of the other colors; for some reason, he linked to the ugliest, most expensive color.
2. Re:$14 is a conservative price by Anonymous Coward · 2016-02-04 18:29 · Score: 0
  
  The cheapest color on DX is $13.10, which is almost $3 more than the price I quoted.
3. Re:$14 is a conservative price by Anonymous Coward · 2016-02-08 05:33 · Score: 0
  
  http://www.aliexpress.com/item...
  US $10.97
Insecure device by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 04:36 · Score: 0

The original firmware is full of easter eggs, including an always on telnet server on port 11880.
In other words this device which is used to transfer data around has an insecure telnet server that you can access the device with. Given it gives enough access to install OpenWRT I'm sure it's easy to read or modify the files on the device.
ESP8266 is smaller and cheaper. by mmiscool · 2016-01-26 04:49 · Score: 2, Informative

The ESP8266 microcontroller can act as an access point and a station at the same time. Can be purchased on line in quantity's of 1 for less than $2.00 and is programmable in C/C++. Supports GPIO on its 10 usable GPIO pins and also has an analog input pin. Is compatible with the arduino environment and has a large community at http://esp8266.com/
1. Re:ESP8266 is smaller and cheaper. by Gaygirlie · 2016-01-26 04:59 · Score: 4
  
  ESP8266 is a great device, but serves completely different needs. It can't act as a wireless repeater/bridge, for example -- it's not a router. Also, it only has ~80KB RAM and can be run at max 160MHz, whereas this device has a 400MHz AR9331 and 64MB RAM and runs Linux; you are basically comparing apples and oranges here.
2. Re:ESP8266 is smaller and cheaper. by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 05:08 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  you are basically comparing apples and oranges here.
  Sounds more like RaspberryPis to OrangePIs if you ask me...
3. Re: ESP8266 is smaller and cheaper. by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-27 20:00 · Score: 0
  
  By definition, a wireless repeater/bridge is not a router, so not sure about your example.
Hmmm by drewsup · 2016-01-26 05:33 · Score: 1

Im thinking older printers as a way to make them wireless, squeeze some more life from my old HP's.....
check aliexpress... $10.50/free ship by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 05:44 · Score: 0

darn, it is cheaper at aliexpress. too late for me.
Carambola 2 is similarly small (28x38mm) by ext42fs · 2016-01-26 06:15 · Score: 4, Informative

The Carambola 2 has the same SoC and runs OpenWrt out of the box.
1. Re:Carambola 2 is similarly small (28x38mm) by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 09:35 · Score: 0
  
  The Carambola 2 has the same SoC and runs OpenWrt out of the box.
  AAAANND costs $45.00 for the privilege.
Remote Booting USB? by CrashNBrn · 2016-01-26 06:22 · Score: 1

So couldn't this be used for "Ask Slashdot: Affordable Hardware For Remote-Booting USB Devices?"
USB interface? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 06:45 · Score: 0

With only a WiFi interface, it's not a very interesting router.
If you could use the USB as a network interface, then it becomes very interesting. Plug it into a computer and you have a wifi router.
Anyone know if that's a possibility?
1. Re:USB interface? by T0min · 2016-01-26 07:22 · Score: 1
  
  If you could use the USB as a network interface, then it becomes very interesting. Plug it into a computer and you have a wifi router.
  Erm. How is that different from connecting a normal cheap wifi USB card and using that computer to route besides the fact that the computer is probably much faster at routing than some card reader?
2. Re:USB interface? by wierd_w · 2016-01-26 09:58 · Score: 1
  
  how fast can you drive the gpio pins, and do they support pwm?
  it may be possible ti slap another device on the gpio to serve as an ethernet asic, and give a wired interface.
  also, I seem to remember USB to ethernet dongles being a thing. If you dont want to hardware hack, that might be a solution.
  Besides, this is all discounting the real interesting thing this enables, and that is being the compute core of a DIY robot. It is small form factor, reasonably powerful, now runs linux, and can accept remote commands over wifi. It has some GPIOs for controlling the robot with.
  Something simple, like a DIY wifi enabled toy car, is just an arduino and some shell scripts away.
  I can think of some pretty clever things one could put this up to. (Simply because it is openwrt, does not mean it needs to be a router. the wifi chip can be run in STA mode instead of AP mode just fine on openwrt. )
3. Re:USB interface? by flex941 · 2016-01-26 10:00 · Score: 1
  
  Difference? Probably no drivers and no support for wireless is needed from computer? No need to enter wifi passwords etc as it's preconfigured in this device. Would be nice way to provide quick access to network at some meeting or to a friend at your home? Just connect USB and you will have the connection ready in a second! ... if it's USB can act in device/slave mode. Not sure about that.
4. Re:USB interface? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 14:30 · Score: 1
  
  There is a USB port. The USB A plug is connected to a USB switch that is controlled via a GPIO pin and connects the card reader to the SoC or the USB A plug (the device can be used as a USB card reader). Other than that, the A plug is only used for power. It is not connected to the SoC. But since the card reader is connected via USB internally, the USB in the SoC is available on the pins that connect the cardreader circuit board to the "mainboard". The SoC is capable of both host and device modes and the GPIO 13 contact, which selects device or host mode, is exposed. The necessary driver code exists for an older OpenWRT version, but has not been updated. With the necessary simple hardware modifications and updated driver code, it should be possible to have the device present itself as a USB network device.
5. Re:USB interface? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 21:27 · Score: 0
  
  There are test points on the circuit board which expose 100Mbps Ethernet. All you need to do is solder a socket with integrated magnetics to those. A virtual network card on USB device mode needs both hardware and software modifications. See the other comments.
I've got SD cards running linux by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 08:18 · Score: 0

this has been around for a couple of years
http://hackaday.com/2013/09/19/advanced-transcend-wifi-sd-hacking-custom-kernels-x-and-firefox/
http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=15.%20Transcend%20WiFiSD
Combine with hacked Wireless SD by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 09:10 · Score: 0

You could also combine this with a hacked wireless SD card since those have very basic little computers on them. You'll not get OpenWRT on it, but you can run something custom.
Great for little sensors, IoT-like devices (that don't require security!) and the like.
All you need is a little enclosure and a small battery to run it, then whatever sensors and stuff you need.
You could probably use the data lines and a simple encoding system + chip to determine what way to set/get data (in the case of multiple devices)
Combined with this, you could do loads more interesting things.
Would work great in a low maintenance farm system.
holy crap by SinShiva · 2016-01-26 16:32 · Score: 1

livejournal still exists?
Simpler update method available... by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 20:55 · Score: 1

Just FYI given the main link goes to livejournal vs the original piece on this; progress has been made to use the device's own firmware upgrade method to install openWRT, making this very easy and noob-friendly!
https://wiki.hackerspace.pl/projects:zsun-wifi-card-reader:factory-update
1. Re:Simpler update method available... by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-26 21:30 · Score: 0
  
  You guys rock.
Encryption uses by elgaard · 2016-01-27 00:26 · Score: 1

The USB gadget support seems to be difficult.
But if you get it to work, you could e.g., have several encrypted and unencrypted filesystems on the SD-card.
Give it to someone and let them see a USB flash drive with the unencrypted data, or give them the password to some files.
Or you could have filesystems, where you can write unencrypted, but not read (from e.g. cameras)
Power draw? by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · 2016-01-27 05:13 · Score: 1

I'm wondering how long this could run off a little battery. A totally wireless AP that lasted a while could be useful.

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1. Re:Power draw? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-27 05:55 · Score: 0
  
  A popular mobile router based on the same SoC, with external USB (but nothing plugged into it) and two Ethernet ports (one connected), runs on less than 1W under full processor load and transmitting on the wireless interface. I expect this to run on about half a watt on average. A small USB power bank should power it for hours, possibly a whole workday.