WRT54G(S) (was Re: [plug] Wireless Linux + A good linux book!)

[Leon Brooks]

On Sunday 20 February 2005 01:19, Chris Caston wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-02-18 at 14:12, Matt Kemner wrote:
>> They also have serial headers onboard, so with a little bit of
>> hacking you can run a serial port on them.  I helped install two of
>> them that are piping serial data (at 4800 baud) to each other
>> between two buildings.

> Cool, but why?

To save digging a very expensive trench between them, if this is the 
installation I'm thinking of.

> Any way of hacking some external storage into it?

That would depend on having a USB driver for a Linuxable router, plus an 
adapter cable (B plug to A socket).

At that point, plus a relatively cheap camera, you could have a wireless 
camera in place for under $300. The bandwidth limitations of USB1.1 
mean only one camera per socket, though.

IIRC, you can also solder RAM in to double the transient storage on many 
of these gadgets.

By that time, of course, the trouble and expense is getting to be enough 
that you could probably justify getting a "real" box with (in relative 
terms, of course) plenty of horsepower, RAM and interfacing (including 
IDE for CF storage and USB for memory sticks) from someone like Motium 
(http://www.motium.com.au/). You lose the switch, but some boards do 
have two ethernet interfaces and up to six USB and/or two serial.

Cheers; Leon