Wireless Card = ARM Development Platform


[Archantos] sent us this one. The mustumbler project is actually trying to use some external hardware to make a miniature wireless stumbler. [Archantos] points out that it’s could be a cheap way to get your hands on an ARM development platform. He’s right. Just a few connections gets access to the I2C bus, a GPIO expander for I2C runs the LCD and an EEPROM is there for program storage. The software is still being sorted out, but the hardware itself is functional. If they can manage to reverse engineer the Conexant chipset, they should have a very promising platform.

10 thoughts on “Wireless Card = ARM Development Platform

  1. I was wondering when hacks like this would appear, but was expecting it to be a more high-end card used, like the “killer-nic”.

    A list of cards containing ISL38xx chips would be usefull.

    :( Unless I already have a card with the chipset, I’ll probably end up picking one up, and I already have too many ARM platforms as it is. 6 Mattle Juiceboxs, not from the overstock.com deal, but from various Wal-Marts and K-Mart. A handfull of wireless and non-wireless routers. In addition to a WinCE PDA. And that’s just the ARM stuff I have laying around.

  2. The D-Link DWL-G120 is an ISL38801K according to the two I have here. I had bought them for use with an older laptop that soon after died and was replaced with a new one with internal wi-fi. Was trying to figure out what to do with them (cards don’t seem to work under Linux). I’d be willing to try this, or donate to the cause if more cards are needed.

  3. i would like to point out that u can run any arbitrary code on the arm processor, the wireless(Baseband) part is the only thing that hasnt been figured out yet so you can run and use this board as a development platform even now, the existing codebase is functionally complete enough for using the board as an amazing development platform, everything else like dma, pci, i2c and gpio have been fully reverse engineered(And have the required software support), here’s the additional link i forgot to post
    http://www.prism54.org/freemac.html
    http://www.prism54.org/mustumbler.html

    Happy Hacking :)

  4. @6, the last a tried was awhile ago (2.6.12). Maybe I just couldn’t get ndiswrapper and stuff to work or maybe it wasn’t fully supported then. Remember not all cards are the same. If I may, what exactly is the card you are using and what are you using to get it to work?

    Also, @3 try http://www.prism54.org/newdrivers.html I didn’t notice the first time around but it has a list of some cards with the isl chips.

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