For years I've been thinking I really need to upgrade my wimpy 15 milliwatt consumer electronics Linksys WRT54G WIFI access-point to a higher power one to cut down on the periodic drop outs around the house and back yard. After much googling I managed to find a few high power nodes, like the Peplink 400mw units, but the nearly $300 price tag was starting to put them out of the range of "fun to have" upgrades.
Then I noticed that Ubiquiti was selling a full access point "motherboard" with radio, cpu, ram, rom, dual ethernet etc for approximately $130. The Ubiquiti LS2 board is Atheros ("ath0") based and can run the OpenWRT Linux kernel and userland. The one fly in the ointment is that the board doesn't come with a power supply, antenna, antenna cable or case. It is a true kit in every sense of the word. The upside is that the board does optionally use power-over-ethernet (POE) so one can run a single cable supplying both power and the ethernet signals to the board. It also allows a very wide range of input power (5v - 24v), allowing one to plug it into an automotive 12v nominal system without any further power regulators.
I've also had a desire to put a small access-point running in client-mode in the car along with a serial-line GPS sensor and automatically record and download the car's tracklogs whenever the car drives by an access point that it either has the keys to or one that is open to the public (such as the local coffee houses or Google's wifi in Mountainview.)
The factory firmware it comes with would probably be good enough for most folks. The problem I had with it was that it refused to let me enter my 256-bit (64 hex char) WPA2 PSK key so it could inter-operate with my existing WIFI AP and laptop. Reducing the security of by going from a full 256-bit key like I had to a passphrase that lost perhaps half the bits by limiting itself to english phrases and slightly mutated english phrases didn't strike me as the right thing to do, especially since this was going to be an AP that had quite a bit more power than my current one. The easiest and quickest fix was to just install OpenWRT.
The released version of OpenWrt, WhiteRussian 0.9, doesn't have the code needed to run the LS2 board. One has to install the more development version called Kamikaze ("divine wind") from the nightly snapshots. At first I was wondering how stable this would be. Well, after a few days playing, it doesn't look unstable at all.
The power supply can be any junk-part 18v computer supply with the semi-standard barrel connector and (+) on the inside connector. The proto box does need to be metal, since the board needs to be attached to something that will act as a bit of a heatsink. For testing I have the board sitting on a small scrap piece of aluminum. It doesn't need much heat sinking, but it does like to be in contact with something other than air.
Installing Kamikaze is relatively quick to install, but one does need to cut and past a few lines from the tutorial at OpenWRT's LS2 Docs
More later...
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wolfgang.rupprecht+web@gmail.com
(Wolfgang S. Rupprecht)
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