

Hardware for OpenWrt - jgj
http://wrtnode.com

======
eric_bullington
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](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.

~~~
zokier
Does Allwinner actually manufacture router-oriented chips? Ralink (now owned
by MediaTek) has been making networking parts for over 10 years now.

> The only non open hardware on Allwinner chips is the ARM-licensed Mali GPU

I seriously doubt that any part of Allwinners chips can be classified as open
hardware. Just to clarify, this is wikipedias view on what open (source)
hardware means:

> The term usually means that information about the hardware is easily
> discerned. Hardware design (i.e. mechanical drawings, schematics, bills of
> material, PCB layout data, HDL source code and integrated circuit layout
> data), in addition to the software that drives the hardware, are all
> released with the FOSS approach.

> Both are very inexpensive Chinese chip manufacturers that use ARM-licensed
> MCUs

The chip in this device has a MIPS core. Besides, MCU != IP-core != SoC.

~~~
eric_bullington
I should have differentiated between "open source hardware" and open hardware.
By using the later term, I meant to describe hardware that uses open source
software to drive the hardware, and that can be easily modified.

And I screwed up with my description of this project -- you're right that it's
a MIPS not ARM core. Sorry about that.

------
mhw
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_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indigo%C2%B2_and_Challenge_M)
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.

~~~
bluedino
SGI's secret sauce was their 64-bitness and their 3D hardware. Their
CPU/networking wasn't really anything special even at the time compared to
Sun/DEC.

~~~
justin66
Not true in my experience. My R4400 and R10000 hardware always ran circles
around SPARC workstations of the era and I wasn't a graphics developer.

~~~
gcb0
all the SGIs i got on enterprise/university auctions were used for networking
tasks... i did got a couple full color cards and couple 3d cards (indy had 8
bit cards, 24 bit cards, and 8bit Z cards -- which were good for 3d. there was
no 24bit 3d)

~~~
bluedino
Didn't they sell a stripped down Indy with no graphics capability under the
Webforce line?

~~~
justin66
There was a stripped down, headless, Indigo2-based server. I'm not sure how
much you could really strip down an Indy, though. It was already kind of their
entry-level thing.

------
Noel_lo
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...](http://battlemesh.org/BattleMeshV7#Donated_OpenHardware_-_WRTnode).
And the Schematic is: [http://cn.wrtnode.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/05/WRTnode_sch...](http://cn.wrtnode.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/05/WRTnode_sch_v01.pdf), 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...](https://github.com/WRTnode/openwrt-
packages/tree/master/ralink/ralink-wifi) , We are trying to communicating with
MTK to open the driver's source.

------
dublinben
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.

~~~
zdw
I was thinking the same thing. Atheros has been very good with Open Source
friendly hardware documentation and licensing.

The downside is that most of the Atheros chips have a single <1Ghz MIPS core,
when most of the rest of the router SoC market is switching to multi core
1GHz+ ARM devices, or is focused on other parts of the device space.

------
slewis
Check this out too:
[http://8devices.com/carambola-2](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.

~~~
gcb0
Everytime i see those things, i dream that i will wake up the next day and
there will be no signs of ISP or cable companies. let alone telcos. only mesh
network and IPv6.

------
click170
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.

~~~
dang
I think you have a point. We took "open source" out of the title as
misleading, since the project apparently isn't there yet.

~~~
cottonseed
Even if they release the original design files, it won't be open source
hardware. Requiring binary blobs clearly violates the Necessary Hardware
Criterion. See the OSH Definition 1.0:

[http://www.oshwa.org/definition/](http://www.oshwa.org/definition/)

~~~
cottonseed
Err, Necessary SOFTWARE Criterion.

------
morley
Is OpenWRT safe to use? The latest release, at least according to
[https://openwrt.org](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.

~~~
magila
OpenWRT's OpenSSL package has been updated to 1.0.1g, so it's not vulnerable
to Heartbleed. The default install doesn't use OpenSSL so there is no need to
update the install images.

~~~
zdw
Additionally, many packages can use alternate, embedded focused SSL libraries
(PolarSSL, etc.) that will also ship with OpenWRT.

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

~~~
cottonseed
They claim they are going to open source it. This is (disappointingly) common
practice among "open source" hardware projects. See, for example, most "open
source" kickstarters.

~~~
voltagex_
Sometimes it's the chipset vendors holding things up, but I agree - it's
getting frustrating.

I'm holding out hope for
[http://www.securifi.com/almondplus](http://www.securifi.com/almondplus)

~~~
cottonseed
Why would you describe your project as open source if you didn't have the
rights to release it as such?

Nothing on that page or their Kickstarter says that Almond+ is meant to be
OSH.

~~~
daveloyall
Idea: OSHW wall of shame. Quick poll: which existing website would be most
likely to volunteer to curate such a page?

edit: OSH --> OSHW

edit: probably [http://www.oshwa.org](http://www.oshwa.org) (seems to be down
right now)

------
cottonseed
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.

~~~
bri3d
Atheros AR7010/AR9271 has open drivers and firmware, which is the closest
you'll get to "fully open" WiFi hardware today. Performance is decent,
although I don't think PCIe is supported by the open firmware (only USB).

------
mschuster91
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.

~~~
lucaspiller
What are the costs exactly? Wifi operates in the 2.4Ghz band which is license
free worldwide.

(As I understand in some countries you need to get a license to sell wifi
devices - some Arduino's have issues with this - but not to use or build
them).

~~~
bcl
You still need to meet the FCC specs for not causing interference (in the US
at least), which can be costly. And you can be sure that a bare board with no
shielding around the RF sections is going to be pretty noisy.

------
tavish1
Less open than many competitors. But more choice is always nice. Hopefully
they get the module FCC/CE certified.

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

~~~
daveloyall
There are newer posts on the Chinese-language version of the site. Click 中文 on
the top right. :P

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

~~~
Kliment
Can't find price but [http://wrtnode.com/tech-
specs.html](http://wrtnode.com/tech-specs.html) says 512M RAM and 128M flash

~~~
Wicher
It says 'Mb'. Chip sizes are frequently expressed in bits, not bytes, so this
could mean 64MiB of ram and 32MiB of flash (I'm assuming mebibits (2^20 bits)
instead of megabits (10^6 bits), for which 'Mb' is the SI symbol).

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

~~~
dublinben
Yes, it appears they did.

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adultSwim
Would this be a good router?

~~~
azdle
Probably not. It doesn't seem to have any Ethernet ports for a start. I think
it's aimed more at being a wifi-enabled device that can do somewhat more
complicated things locally.

~~~
Sanddancer
The board has an ethernet switch built in, with all the pins for it broken
out. You're going to have to supply your own magnetics and jacks for it
though. The chip in it [1] is very much built around routing lots and lots of
packets. I kinda wish they'd have released a board based on its bigger sibling
with PCIe, though.

[1]
[http://www.anz.ru/files/mediatek/MT7620_Datasheet.pdf](http://www.anz.ru/files/mediatek/MT7620_Datasheet.pdf)

