from Hacker News

Hardware for OpenWrt

by jgj on 6/30/14, 11:11 AM with 59 comments

• by eric_bullington on 6/30/14, 4:32 PM

  This is an interesting project, but it's a shame they're using a Mediatek chipset instead of an Allwinner one. Mediatek is one of the biggest GPL violators out there, while Allwinner chips are among the most open hardware out there (perhaps the most open). See:

  http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page

  The only non open hardware on Allwinner chips is the ARM-licensed Mali GPU, but it's been reversed engineered to the point of producing a working, third-party, open source driver (the lima driver).

  Both are very inexpensive Chinese chip manufacturers that use ARM-licensed MCUs, so it's not like the Allwinner is a vastly different product.

  I personally prefer licensing projects with a permissive license that permits closed commercial development, such as the MIT or BSD license, over the GPL. However, when a company like Mediatek chooses to use GPL'ed software and then fails to follow the license terms, I think that displays a contempt for the entire open source community that I cannot support.

• by mhw on 6/30/14, 1:29 PM

  A fun comparison: 20 years ago you could spend a large number of dollars (anyone remember how much?) on a dreamy Silicon Graphics Indigo2 Unix workstation. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indigo%C2%B2_and_Challenge_... its specs included:

  * MIPS CPUs ranging from the the R4000 to the R10000, with clock rates of up to 250MHz. (This project uses a related MIPS CPU that clocks at 600MHz.)

  * Up to 512Mb of RAM, equal to that in this project. The Wikipedia articles explains that the Indigo2 hardware could theoretically support 1Gb of RAM, but the thermal output of the DRAM available at the time was too great for the enclosure.

  * 100Mbit/s wired Ethernet network interface (this project provides 802.11n wireless networking, which Wikipedia claims will reach 600Mbit/s).

  I find it staggering that the hardware that was once powering a high-end workstation is now being put to good use as a low power router. It's good to see that after all this time you can still run a version of Unix on the same hardware though.

• by Noel_lo on 6/30/14, 4:32 PM

  Hello people, I am Noel from WRTnode.com. Very glad that you notice us. Actually, we have opened public Beta version sale in China for RMB$148(as US$24), and closed today as two month later. We have donated 20 boards for the BattleMesh V7 http://battlemesh.org/BattleMeshV7#Donated_OpenHardware_-_WR.... And the Schematic is: http://cn.wrtnode.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/WRTnode_sch..., and we will give all the BOMlist and PCBlayout soon. Maybe it will be sold publicly at the ends of July. All OpenWrt firmware source comes from dev.openwrt.org. The board is officially supported by OpenWrt.org as one of the three devices on MT7620n. the only thing bothered is that the Wi-Fi driver of MT7620n is close-sourced by the MTK, so we have to provide the .ko binary driver in https://github.com/WRTnode/openwrt-packages/tree/master/rali... , We are trying to communicating with MTK to open the driver's source.

• by dublinben on 6/30/14, 4:19 PM

  It seems unusual to pick a Mediatek SoC, if the goal is open source compatibility. It would have made much more sense to go with an Atheros SoC and Atheros modems, which can be used with no proprietary binaries whatsoever.

• by slewis on 6/30/14, 4:36 PM

  Check this out too: http://8devices.com/carambola-2

  The hardware design isn't open-source, but all the software is, and it's available now for 19euro per module.

  It's built on Atheros' AR9331 chipset which means you get to use the awesome open-source ath9k driver.

• by click170 on 6/30/14, 8:00 PM

  Frankly I'm getting tired of these empty posts. Where is the source?

  Can we stop posting "news" like this unless it is actually significant, ie contains the thing that they claim is open?

  Its almost to the point where these posts should be flagged IMO.

• by morley on 6/30/14, 2:23 PM

  Is OpenWRT safe to use? The latest release, at least according to https://openwrt.org, was in April 2013. I'm not intimately familiar with what software packages it uses, but it seems like it could, at the very least, be vulnerable to Heartbleed.

• by daveloyall on 6/30/14, 4:15 PM

  I'm missing something: where is the source code (design files?) for this "open source hardware"?

• by cottonseed on 6/30/14, 4:50 PM

  It seems very hard to find an high-performance (i.e., not TI's CC3000 module), open Wifi module for a project like this. I assume that's why they choose a chip that requires a binary blob Wifi driver. Has anyone researched the open alternatives? Novena for example didn't integrate Wifi but left it to a PCIe module. Are there open PCIe modules?

  edit: I should say, TI's module isn't open either. As far as I know the firmware, which includes a TCP/IP stack, isn't open.

• by mschuster91 on 6/30/14, 2:55 PM

  I'm sorry to bust the fun on this, but I would never rebuild this device (or anything other with radio capability)... simply because of the costs of certification which is mandatory for any RF transmitter.

• by tavish1 on 6/30/14, 5:34 PM

  Less open than many competitors. But more choice is always nice. Hopefully they get the module FCC/CE certified.

• by hwh on 6/30/14, 3:15 PM

  The latest post there that I was able to find was from April 2014 - is there any news? Am I missing something?

• by tonypace on 6/30/14, 12:57 PM

  This looks very useful, but price, RAM and flash sizes are not readily apparent. Am I missing something?

• by daveloyall on 6/30/14, 4:15 PM

  Did they choose a wireless chipset that requires "binary blobs"?

• by adultSwim on 6/30/14, 1:52 PM

  Would this be a good router?