[MLB-WIRELESS] BIPAC-743: ADSL, 802.11b, 4xEthernet

[Jason Hecker]

A lot of these nice little devices seem to run ARM derivatives, especially 
if they contain Atmel devices.  Unfortunately, a lot of these cheap ARM 
core based devices lack the all essential MMU for plonking something 
useful like NetBSD, Linux or eCOS onto them.  From what I can tell, none 
of Atmel's devices have an MMU, so all these nifty network devices like 
ADSL modems and wireless AP's run closed source operating systems that 
you're going to have to pay for.

If you're in luck and do have an MMU, chances are then the operating 
system to try to jam on it won't have drivers for the various I/O parts on 
the board.

OpenAP is able to run Linux as it uses an out of production AMD embedded
486 which hooks up the serial port and ethernet chip off an ISA bus and
the Orinoco (?) wireless card off the 16 bit PCMCIA bus - so drivers would
have worked out of the box pretty much.

Though, it never hurts to crack open your wireless widget to check the
chips in the slim hope you can do something with it.

> > Has anyone looked into whether it is possible
> > to port Linux to it?  It might make a neat
> > little wireless platform.
> >
> > Does anyone have a clue what processor it uses,
> > or anything else about its internals?
> 
> Cant remember a lot about it but I think I sold one of these once. It is
> running a strongarm CPU from memory.

-- 
Cheers,
jASON
---------------------------------------------
--== http://www.wireless.org.au/~jhecker ==--
---------------------------------------------


To unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo at wireless.org.au
with "unsubscribe melbwireless" in the body of the message