OpenWRT on Ebox3300 part I

08 Sep 2014 | Comments

In this series, I’ll describe my adventure with Ebox3300 industrial mini-pci and turning it to quite capable router. It’ll be also a little guide how to hack OpenWRT Linux distribution.

Introduction

Some time ago I received as a gift small, little, industrial computer. It isn’t very powerful but it’s very power efficient. Especially for a x86 architecture based system. It runs on 5V and needs less than 2 amps, so it’s about 10W. It’s form factor is also appealing.

It was laying around for some time collecting dust, because I haven’t got any use for it (or so I thought ;)). Now the time has come to make something productive out of it. Also I thought, I will share some of my experiences.

The machine

The machine can be found here. I’m going to show some more interesting specs with my comments. For the specifics look at the vendor page.

Here are the specs:

• VESA mounting support
  • so we can mount it on the TV!,
• Processor: Vortex86DX 1GHz
  • vendor says it’s 600MHz, but I suppose Linux knows better ;),
• Ram: 256MB DDR2,
  • quite enough for my needs,
• 3 USB 2.0 ports,
• Compact Flash slot
  • seen as hard drive - boot possible,
• µSD card slot
  • also seen as hard drive - boot possible,
• 10/100Mbps LAN,
• VGA port,
• twin RS232
  • for those, who fancy old school serial interfaces - including me ;),
  • one of them is debug port, we can even set BIOS setup menu to be accessible through it (we don’t need a monitor and/or keyboard - hooray!),
  • null modem cable is a must! :)
• internal Mini PCI socket,
• C-Media Electronics based USB audio interface,
  • supported by Linux,
  • aux output and mic input jacks present,
• power supply: 5V/2A
  • power efficiency I love, it takes less power than my old router ;)

So, it’s quite capable device in such a small box.

The plan

Recently, my old Netgear router (802.11g and WPA only - sic!) started behaving bad and generally I had enough of it. It worked for quite some years, but the upgrade was needed (and I was bored ;)). Then I noticed this little computer in my equipment box. The power efficiency was great and I wished to play with it a little. So there came the plan: put a Linux in a box and turn it to some badass router/server and hack with OpenWRT along the way ;).

My goals:

• replace my old router,
• OpenWRT based distro,
• 802.11n wlan connection,
• lots of capabilities to play with.

So, in the next part I will say a little about the first steps and problems.