OpenWrt on the MeshCube

Seb — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:12:00 +0200

Where I work we use a lot of MeshCubes to create an OLSR powered network.
It is a tiny wireless router with two minipci slots and one Ethernet slot.
It has a 400 MHz MIPS based processor, 64 MB of RAM and 32 MB of Flash.

It is sad that it was discontinued and that the main site (meshcube.org) is down.
There is a mirror here.

The other problem is that the Linux distribution that runs it (nylon) is unmaintained. The good news is that OpenWrt works on the au1500 processor.
The installation without a serial cable is very simple:

Download the OpenWrt au1000 images:

   # wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/7.09/au1000-2.6/openwrt-au1000-2.6-vmlinux.bin
   # wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/7.09/au1000-2.6/openwrt-au1000-2.6-jffs2-128k.fs

Copy them to the cube:

   # scp openwrt-au1000-2.6-vmlinux.bin root@192.168.0.250:/tmp
   # scp openwrt-au1000-2.6-jffs2-128k.fs root@192.168.0.250:/tmp

Make sure nothing writes to the flash (kill most processes but not ssh!)
Copy to flash

   # flashcp -v openwrt-au1000-2.6-vmlinux.bin /dev/mtd/2
   # flashcp -v openwrt-au1000-2.6-jffs2-128k.fs /dev/mtd/0

Thats it!

Links:

UsualCoding.eu - meshcube

OpenWrt on the MeshCube