How long have we been hacking routers? To some of you who’ve been in the Hackaday audience for a while, the answer is “nearly forever”. In the early 2000s, they were one of the few consumer gadgets that had the trifecta of hackability: WiFi and networking built in, a user-friendly Linux operating system, and a few spare GPIOs that could control from the OS. Back when the Linksys WRT54GL was the king of the hill, we saw some pretty absurd hacks.
Take this example robot from October 2008. Link-rot hasn’t been kind to the original project, but from what we can tell, it used the GPIOs to drive servo motors hacked for continuous rotation, and features the equally anachronistic CD-ROM wheels. Where would you even get those today?
But the OS that this 18-year-old hack uses is still around: OpenWRT Linux. Although it still takes its name from the lovable purple router of old, it hasn’t supported that particular model in over a decade because of growing memory requirements. But it’s still the go-to distro for any modern router hacks, and it provides a lot more general-purpose Linux than you might expect on otherwise constrained platforms. As Tom pointed out in the podcast, if you see a used router for cheap, see if it’s supported by OpenWRT, and if it is, buy it.
While the project that got us thinking about routers again, Al’s recent networking hack, basically uses the router as a souped-up router, that’s by no means a given. OpenWRT is a real Linux OS, and can make use of most peripherals that your router find has available. Networking? Of course. USB? No problem. If you find a serial port and some GPIOs, you’re most of the way to a Linux SBC, although very likely a headless one.
There are a lot of hacks we see go in and out of style, and we see software projects come and go. But here we tip our hat to the router hacks, and to the plucky Linux OS that’s been ported to them all. Long may it keep old devices out of the landfill!
Featured image: My old baby, about a year or so before something in the radio modem finally gave up the ghost.
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