I've got a few-years-old WiFi doodad and, believe it or not, Google seems to imply no-one has hacked it yet.

Weird.

Spent most of the day looking into it, and ironically, it's running Linux already. Redhat, it seems. Found a few test-points and sure-'nough two are for a serial-port and the kernel's already routed to 'em, and once that's wired-up logging in as root is pretty-durn-simple.

So, actually, it's a 4G-Hotspot... and it's kinda weird.

First I found the processor, which is clearly marked "ARM" despite there being no info on it except a whitepaper on the 'web. That whitepaper claims it's dual-core, but I'm almost certain Linux is only running on one core (what's the other doing?). The thing is, it seems to be detecting a slightly older model of the CPU (that musta been single-core?). So, there's that. I have yet to find a (open-source-hacked) router based on this chip, but have found several based on the one it's detecting.

Then there's the wifi aspect... Apparently this thing has *two* WiFi devices, and, again, only *one* is implemented in software. Though, Linux detects them both, only one is actually configured. And looking at the board, it seems both are clearly *physically installed*. Some of the commented-out configuration options suggest that it might've originally been designed for a "guest" access-point (over 4G?!)

Oh, and the screen's kinda fun... It's a color graphical LCD with both an SPI and parallel-RGB interface. Would be great for something like an AVR project (and, in fact, it is included with an Atmel Dev-Kit). It seems, oddly, that the screen is handled entirely by an application and wired-up only with SPI... There's a framebuffer device (fb0), but it doesn't seem to be used for anything, and would it actually send the right SPI commands to the display if it was? It almost seems like fb0 is a dummy-device.

So, I've been looking into hacking it for my needs... My "network" is currently wired-only, and my desktop's old wifi card is weaker than my phone's... So it's a bit weird to use a 4G-Hotspot as nothing more than a WiFi Router (and USB NIC), but that may well be how I'll end up using it.

Coupled with my Pentium-150 laptop with PCMCIA WiFi card (and hard-disk that didn't spin-up until I dropped it), and VNC, I think I might finally get to sit on the couch and surf the web or maybe even work on a software project again, and on a reasonable-sized screen and a keyboard, to boot! :)

(Repairing my PowerBook G4's GPU is daunting... I've tried a couple old iBooks with the same problem and made 'em worse. I've got the idea down, preheat the bottom of the board, be more careful about it being perfectly stationary through the whole process, cool it slowly, a few other things... the most-daunting aspect is all those blasted screws which've been out of it for over a year, now. Still sitting on their heads in the original layout on a cookie-sheet in my cupboard... Will I remember which are the *bare minimum* to reassemble the thing *just to test* whether it worked? ...among other things. VNC on a P150 is starting to sound quite doable in comparison).

...Heh, and I thought I'd have to install openWRT or DD-WRT or something, and since this machine/CPU hasn't been documented-as-hacked, I figured I'd have to figure out how to detect the CPU core, the memory/IO mappings, how to compile new firmware, send it over JTAG, and more... Now, it almost looks like I can just change a couple configuration-files...?! Shoulda done this *ages* ago. Anyways, not there yet, have to figure out *which* configuration files to change. There are about four copies of each one in various locations on the various partitions. And the ones I've looked at, so far, don't seem to have the options I'm looking for.

Also, it's pretty locked-down, as far as being able to export/import files... SSH and Telnet aren't even installed, it seems... The only thing I've found so-far is Curl... (and, oddly, support for a wide-range of SCSI CD-ROM drives?! As far as I can tell, it doesn't even have USB-HID support!). Not sure if what I'm going-for *can* be done with the supplied applications... and don't (yet) know enough about the various ARM cores and Linux incarnations to know whether I can just cross-compile an application to a target that doesn't have header-files, etc.

UPDATE: I think I found my answer on that one... maybe not kernel modules (yet), but surely applications.