WL-700gE Serial Port mod

posted Jan 17th 2007 12:22am by Will O'Brien
filed under: peripherals hacks, wireless hacks

The Asus WL-700gE is an interesting device. It provides NAS, streaming and routing services thanks to linux. In their quest to modify the WL-700gE to a more flexible platform, [Eric] documented adding a serial port to its not so spacious innards. (FYI, Standard serial/RS-232 signals are around ~~5 volts~~ ok, more like 12. I was thinking of the max 232/n variety) Asus was kind enough to provide through hole mounts and a TTL interface right on the board with console access already turned on.

I hadn’t realized it before, but the Siemens phone USB data cable is a nice cheap source of USB to TTL serial interfaces. Ironically, replacing the cable on the data unit was actually more difficult than adding the port to the router.

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Comments [14]

tagged: asus wl-700ge, AsusWl-700ge, serial mod, SerialMod, siemens usb phone cable, SiemensUsbPhoneCable

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FIRST !!! :))

Posted at 1:03 pm on Jan 17th, 2007 by Modrak

Wait…

Standard RS-232 is **NOT** 5V; it’s more like +/- 12–25V.

Posted at 1:16 pm on Jan 17th, 2007 by Nick Johnson

Since this thing is already on the network, and is running linux, why just use SSH? The Dropbear SSH server is only like 100kb…

Or, if you guys were really hackers you would have used a small usb enabled PIC to do the serial-> usb conversion. There is plenty of room on that board to add the like 5 parts you would need.

Posted at 5:39 pm on Jan 17th, 2007 by ...

#3, if you’d read the article, he describes exactly what they need it for:
“Okay, seriously, the real work of replacing the Asus provided firmware lies ahead. Brett Neumeier has already demonstrated progress on it.

Now that we have a serial console, it should be possible to build our linux, flash it onto the system, watch it boot, see where it crashes, and make some changes, re-flash, watch it boot, see where it crashes, lather-rinse-repeat. This will be a time consuming and tedious process, I’m sure. At times I expect it to be down right infuratingly frustrating. My hope is that in the end we have a powerful linux server in a tiny package and, more importantly, a deeper understanding of linux, cross-compiling, and embedded systems in general.”

Posted at 7:12 pm on Jan 17th, 2007 by triikan

http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Asus/WL700gE

You might want to have a look here – help them get OpenWRT installed on the device. It’s still a work in progress, but it barely works now.

Posted at 9:04 pm on Jan 17th, 2007 by t3h

From what I read about the machine, it may have a nice selection of features, but they are poorly integrated and the ui is bad. There are also lots of bugs.

I can see why they would want to do this. Its a machine with great potential: If they complete this project, I’d probably buy one myself.

Posted at 9:07 pm on Jan 17th, 2007 by atrain

I agree with the uC solution for direct USB. I’ve also though of using cellphone data cables for cheap usb to serial. but really theses days they go for the same price than “full blow” usb2rs232 adaptors on ebay (like 1Â£ -pounds sterling if the egines messes that up – + S&H from Hong Kong ;P). The direct uC solution would probably cost around the same or a bit cheaper if you can grab the parts locally and/or have some laying around. It would have the added bonus of a direct usb cable in the back of the machine :D Not to mention the hack/geek factor++

Posted at 1:58 am on Jan 18th, 2007 by xSmurf

So yeah Â£ was fine but uC (ÂµC)… damn thing! hehehe

Posted at 2:03 am on Jan 18th, 2007 by xSmurf

But dudes, openwrt and firmware from oleg and i think even dd-wrt supports this router. Just check out wl500g.info

Posted at 10:01 am on Jan 18th, 2007 by Skywave

Great:-)and unbelievably…

Posted at 12:00 pm on Jan 18th, 2007 by Little bear

OpenWrt doesn’t support it out fully yet. There’s patches to add led, button and most important ide controller driver. See http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Asus/WL700gE for details.

OpenWrt support is close, but not for Whiterussian (aka stable), only for Kamikaze (unstable).

Posted at 9:30 am on Jan 19th, 2007 by jr

Great to see the interest!

Yes, direct mini-usb jack on the chassis would be way nicer than the usb serial cable hack, I agree. But I’m a hardware novice. If someone would post pictures and instructions, that’d be great!

OpenWRT is a great project. We even donated a WL-700gE to the OpenWRT project so that they could get some real traction with it. We hope they get 100% support soon. Their goals are not the same as ours (for instance, we want only a bootloader in flash), but obviously we want to cheer them on.

So far the only patches I’ve seen to support much of the hardware for the Asus WL-700gE are against the 2.4 kernel. Our efforts involve porting to the 2.6 kernel.

Brett Neumeier has made great strides. He helped me rebuild the Asus “GPL” “source” tarball, and flash it on the system. Also, when last we VNCed together, he was demonstrating how to get network booting to work so we can boot new kernels over the network (thus no need to re-flash for every change) and in that session we worked through mounting a root filesystem over NFS.

So progress is slow, but non-zero.

Wish us luck!

Posted at 1:32 pm on Jan 19th, 2007 by Eric Herman

I’ll be back

Posted at 9:06 pm on Jan 23rd, 2007 by Stuart

The reason why it builded on 2.4 is because 2.6 hasn’t got a stable wireless driver :(

Take a look over here some guys have made great site on how to set up openwrt on it, And I must say running it for 2/3 weeks now. It turned my device in one bad ass router capable doing almost anything :)
http://wl700g.homelinux.net/

Posted at 7:37 pm on Mar 11th, 2007 by Ronnie

WL-700gE Serial Port mod

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