Urgent help for the Dharamsala Wireless Mesh
Here is a recent post to the DITG mailing list.
The original post can be found here:
DITG mailing list
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Hi all,
We are facing a small crisis with the on-going development of the Mesh, and we need your urgent help:
To build the Mesh routers, we use an SBC board (Single Board Computer) made by a large Taiwanese company called Broadcaom.
http://www.broadcom.com/
On that board we run a special version of home-brew Linux and many other packages beneath it.
It is difficult to buy this board directly from Broadcom, as they only take a minimal order of 100,000 units.
Until now, we where simply buying ready-made routers from multiple vendors, who use the same board.
The lowest cost router in which we find this board was a Linksys wireless router, model WRT54G.
http://www1.linksys.com/international/product.asp?coid=12&ipid=452
This model sells for around $50 in the USA.
In India it is a bit more expansive, but we have good links with the main Cisco distributor in Delhi, and we get good price for the local market.
Yesterday we got a large shipment of routers (finally, after waiting for them for some time), and we discovered that Linksys had changed the unit completely.
Linksys now sell under the same name and same model number, a totally new and inferior hardware.
They had made many changes to the hardware before, but these where minor, only to reduce their manufacturing cost, so they can lower the product cost even further.
This new hardware version however, is a complete re-design. It has half the RAM and half the flash size, and to make a long story short - we cannot use it anymore!!!
What we need to do now, it to find alternate low-cost hardware to run our software.
There are many alternatives, yet all of them are more expansive then that linksys.
In the meanwhile, I like to ask all of you to try and find the older versions of that router, and ship to us as many as you can.
The new hardware version is v5.0 - anything older then that version we can use.
I have written a detailed manual, with photos, explaining how to find what version of hardware is inside the router on a shelf in the shops.
http://www.yahel.org/misc/WRT54G-ID-1.pdf
Many shops will know what you are talking about, if you call and ask what hardware version of Linksys WRT54G router they have.
Also, many shops will have no clue what you are talking about, and will tell you to download whatever version you like from Linksys site.
They refer to the firmware version (software) which indeed you can download and change.
We are only interested in the hardware version - as explained in my manual.
In addition, I will list here other manufacturers which use a similar or same hardware on which we can run our Mesh software.
It would be very helpful if you can survey your local markets and find which of these has the lowest price tag.
We'll need to buy such new routers and start to experiment and make the needed modifications for that new hardware.
You can find the list here:
http://www.yahel.org/misc/Potential-routers-21.pdf
Naturally, we are doing everything we can to find alternatives here in India. But it’s not easy.
So please – dear friends, this is an urgent task, you can all help here.
Thanks!!
Yahel.
Dharamsala.
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