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

Posted by timothy on 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.

8 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Wrong link by 110010001000 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The link for the instructions are: https://wiki.hackerspace.pl/pr... The link in the summary is just blogspam.

  2. Nice and small by Midnight+Thunder · · 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.

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
    1. Re:Nice and small by Gaygirlie · · 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.

  3. ESP8266 is smaller and cheaper. by mmiscool · · 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 · · 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 · · Score: 2, Funny

      you are basically comparing apples and oranges here.

      Sounds more like RaspberryPis to OrangePIs if you ask me...

  4. Carambola 2 is similarly small (28x38mm) by ext42fs · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Carambola 2 has the same SoC and runs OpenWrt out of the box.

  5. Re:$14 is a conservative price by Dagger2 · · 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.