TL-WR710N Modifications

Hello all, I just hardware-modded a TP-Link wireless router and wanted to share.

First of all, the device has following hardware; Atheros AR7240 as platform, AR93xx as integrated wifi, 32 mb ram, 8 mb rom (this is very important, as most of the same class devices has 4 mb rom), a USB port, 2 LAN/WAN Ethernet interfaces. It powers up via a wall-socket.

 

The exact model I used is TP-Link TL-WR710N v1.2 (there are revision numbers to all TP-Link devices that can be seen on the labels of the boxes, in my case mine was v1.2).  

 

First modification I wanted to do was a battery mod; so I figured two cables can be soldered to the under the cap called c207, as red to square (+) and black to round (-) and the device can be powered up with 4 AA battery. If you desire so, you can use USB 1A too. I also shared the same pics on OpenWRT Wiki and Forums.

 

Next I re-connected the original wall-socket input cables. So if I wanted to use a wall-socket, I'll be able to.

 

Also I added a switch for usb mod, you can see below, not that important.

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Next was Antenna Mod; I first learnt that I need to break the connection between -below- these 2 connection.

 

then of course soldered a tail antenna from a broken adsl modem.

 

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After that I of course changed the firmware with OpenWRT and live happily ever after. TP-Link Routers are awesome devices for OpenWRT. I highly recommend TP-Link for such occasions. This device is also a very good example to that, 'cause it has 8 mb rom.

Peace...

Edimax 3G-6200nL & Raspberry Pi

I am sharing the setting I recently got together. At the time of preparing it, it makes much sense to me. After completing it, I found it pretty useless; but maybe it gives some inspiration to someone to do similar thing for a more useful project so I am sharing.

First I flashed my old Edimax 3G-6200nL with OpenWRT, details are on the OpenWRT forums, a guy did an awesome job to put together the trunk image.

'Tho the configuration of the router was very hard and painful due to only 16 mb of ram on the device, many resets has been issued till I am done with it and disable the LuCI for good for some more space in the memory. The model 3G-6200n has 32 mb of ram, just a reminder.

I used the router's Wi-Fi to connect to an AP. Share the connection through its Ethernet. So Raspberry Pi gets internet wirelessly (well kind of... lol) and used the router's USB to power up the Pi, strangely it did the trick no problem. I am using only one mini blutooth dongle on the Pi for both keyboard+mouse. But I also modded the Pi with a very mini fan and a cooling plate, fan operates from the gpio of the Pi itself as seen in the photos.

So what do I have here?

2A@5V adapter of the 6200nL powers up both the router and the Pi as in such configuration. I have a Linux ARM PC with a dedicated router which consumes as little as 2A@5V.

full size of the photos:
http://sdrv.ms/17d2GOK
Let me know if link of the full size photos is problematic.