© 2017
Online notepad made of some random thoughts about Linux and embedded systems.
Main idea is to create this project from scratch and use it to gain some interesting knowledge. Also from this moment I’m starting to call this project WDAN (Wireless Data Acquisition Network), because project should have some name ;). Here are some thoughts about the stack.
Some time ago, I’ve done a project for my thesis. It was wireless weather data acquisition network. I’ve made several sensor nodes with radios, set up some server with database and created a site, which presented collected data. It was nice, quite interesting idea, because I’ve managed to do a mesh networking using DSR protocol and it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately implementation was pretty bad and whole system was very unstable. It was enough for proving the concept and doing needed research, yet it wasn’t enough to be used as finished product and since then, it’s collecting dust. I’ve always wanted to do a refresh and redesign it to be a proper system.
This is the last part of the quick overview showing how to put and run OpenWRT on an exemplary device. I’m going to describe how to add this device as build system target in order to use it as any other. This is rather short part, because it’s only about adding several files to the OpenWRT’s sources tree.
In this part, I’m going to describe my problems and solutions to the networking subsystem of the Ebox3300. The goal is to have ethernet controller connected to the WAN and some kind of WLAN module to be an access point for my computers. Device I have, has ethernet controller built in, but no WLAN functionality at all. It has USB 2.0 ports, so it’s possible to attach pendrive-style WLAN card. It also has mini-PCI connector inside, so there are some options to choose from.
In this part, we will deal with enabling not functioning parts of our device. We’ve already noticed, that there are no disks seen and ethernet controller is also not visible. The second is quite easily resolved by selecting appropriate options in the OpenWRT menuconfig. However the first thing is going to be more interesting, as we will be creating patch to the OpenWRT build tree itself. The solution to these hardware problems I’ve found on this blog.