I have an ac1900 wifi router that isn’t in use and had support dropped by the vendor. My home network is already set up, so I don’t have a need for it – otherwise, I’d probably flash OpenWRT on it. Any ideas for what I could use it for?

  • j4k3@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    11 months ago

    If you’re into hardware and maker stuff, it is ideal for learning Linux embedded. The radios are likely on PCI buses that are just integrated on the PCB. You can work on programming the kernel stuff. This guy has been doing a great job at building up and documenting this kind of dev skills lately: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHkwlexIsoJVa5g_G9g18GA

    You can also try and use the UART serial port that is likely broken out and any LED or button pins as an enable line for chip select and that will give you access to SPI as the SPI bus will be connected to the flash memory chip and that is easy to find documentation for in practice. A router is basically a beagle bone level of development board that comes with a nice enclosure - IMO.