Last week I tried to hack the Asus WL520GU wifi router, after reading this article - Building a Wifi Radio. Though you do not need to have a serial console to hack it, It makes all the sense to have one, just to know what is going on in your router. I bought some 0.1" male header on-line and soldered in the right place as shown in the mightyOhm article. I hit a road block when i found that i needed a serial driver to connect Asus Router to serial cable.
Router gives out 3.3V TTL signals. Whereas a RS232-serial port needs +/-12V signalling. If you connect a serial cable straight to router's header, it will not work. You need a chip to convert TTL level to RS232 level signals. The article mentioned about driver FTDI-232-3V3 which I could not find on-line in India. I tried this PC-MCU Serial Link (USB) converter, which is available on-line robokits.
This PC-MCU has a Female-header that does not work as signals order is different. You need to solder wires and 0.1" 4pin-female header as per the order given in the mightOhm article. Just leave the VCC pin as the driver chip gets power from USB. Connecting Gnd,Tx,Rx lines is enough to make it work. After you prepare the driver cable and connect to header and other end to USB of your laptop. Device Driver needs to be installed in order for the laptop to recognize the usb device as a serial COM port. After inserting the chord and driver, I get a new COM4 device to work with. I used Putty to connect -115200-8N1.
The mightyOhm article provides a Kamikaze build, Flashing procedure is straight forward. It was simple and trouble free to install kamikaze. Soon I realized that the kamikaze runs old 2.4 kernel. Sure enough, I had to upgrade to Backfire, which i did immediately.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
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