As was pointed out to us in the comments, it would lower the barrier of entry if we were to provide the firmware for the project, in such a form as to be compatible with existing routers. This would allow people to use their own hardware, rather than having to spend money on new devices (and, as we all know, the main people who will be setting mesh nets up have enough boxen lying around as is...)

We thought this was a fantastic idea, however it comes with a caveat - not everyone will want to flash their own firmware, and as a result, we feel that we should provide a device of our own, as well. This is, however, a secondary goal - the firmware itself will take focus, at least in the beginning.

This also comes with a change in the method used to connect to the host - initially, we were using USB. Now, however, to utilize this existing hardware, we must use Ethernet. This comes with its own challenges, not least of which is addressing - do we forward packets straight to the network (as we would have done with USB), or do we provide some sort of NAT and DHCP? Or, other?

This exposes another issue, that existed already anyway, and that's the allocation of addresses on the mesh itself. Each device, which I'm now going to refer to as an access point for convenience, will need its own IP address for routing purposes. These addresses will need to be allocated in some way, and if the net is to stay truly failure resistant, a single AP hosting a DHCP server will not work, for reasons that should be obvious. However, for now, the goal is to get a device booting OpenWRT, so for now this isn't a concern. All things in due time.