OpenWrt Turns a $14 Card Reader Into the Smallest Wireless AP

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.

Wrong link

[110010001000]

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

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[account_deleted]

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[account_deleted]

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[greenfruitsalad]

will you walk around shopping malls with an open access point with a captive portal that redirects any url requests to a locally stored goatse picture? naughty naughty...

Nice and small

[Midnight Thunder]

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.

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[Midnight Thunder]

I had understood there was an element of soldering and de-soldering involved.

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[Darinbob]

It doesn't really seem that small overall. 64MB RAM with 16MB flash is not tiny in the home router world where OpenWRT, DD-WRT, and the like are popular. It's tiny in physical size only.

Re:$14 is a conservative price

[Dagger2]

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.

ESP8266 is smaller and cheaper.

[mmiscool]

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/ [esp8266.com]

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[Anonymous Coward]

you are basically comparing apples and oranges here.

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

Hmmm

[drewsup]

Im thinking older printers as a way to make them wireless, squeeze some more life from my old HP's.....

Carambola 2 is similarly small (28x38mm)

[ext42fs]

The Carambola 2 [8devices.com] has the same SoC and runs OpenWrt out of the box.

Remote Booting USB?

[CrashNBrn]

So couldn't this be used for "Ask Slashdot: Affordable Hardware For Remote-Booting USB Devices?" [slashdot.org]

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[T0min]

If you could use the USB as a network interface, then it becomes very interesting. Plug it into a computer and you have a wifi router.

Erm. How is that different from connecting a normal cheap wifi USB card and using that computer to route besides the fact that the computer is probably much faster at routing than some card reader?

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[flex941]

Difference? Probably no drivers and no support for wireless is needed from computer? No need to enter wifi passwords etc as it's preconfigured in this device. Would be nice way to provide quick access to network at some meeting or to a friend at your home? Just connect USB and you will have the connection ready in a second! ... if it's USB can act in device/slave mode. Not sure about that.

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[Anonymous Coward]

There is a USB port. The USB A plug is connected to a USB switch that is controlled via a GPIO pin and connects the card reader to the SoC or the USB A plug (the device can be used as a USB card reader). Other than that, the A plug is only used for power. It is not connected to the SoC. But since the card reader is connected via USB internally, the USB in the SoC is available on the pins that connect the cardreader circuit board to the "mainboard". The SoC is capable of both host and device modes and the GP

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[wierd_w]

how fast can you drive the gpio pins, and do they support pwm?

it may be possible ti slap another device on the gpio to serve as an ethernet asic, and give a wired interface.

also, I seem to remember USB to ethernet dongles being a thing. If you dont want to hardware hack, that might be a solution.

Besides, this is all discounting the real interesting thing this enables, and that is being the compute core of a DIY robot. It is small form factor, reasonably powerful, now runs linux, and can accept remote comma

holy crap

[SinShiva]

livejournal still exists?

Simpler update method available...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just FYI given the main link goes to livejournal vs the original piece on this; progress has been made to use the device's own firmware upgrade method to install openWRT, making this very easy and noob-friendly!

https://wiki.hackerspace.pl/projects:zsun-wifi-card-reader:factory-update

Encryption uses

[elgaard]

The USB gadget support seems to be difficult.
But if you get it to work, you could e.g., have several encrypted and unencrypted filesystems on the SD-card.

Give it to someone and let them see a USB flash drive with the unencrypted data, or give them the password to some files.

Or you could have filesystems, where you can write unencrypted, but not read (from e.g. cameras)

Power draw?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I'm wondering how long this could run off a little battery. A totally wireless AP that lasted a while could be useful.