As part of the proof-of-concept work around the Mesh Potato, David and Elektra have more or less settled on the Atheros AR2317 chip as a likely candidate for the Mesh Potato. This is partly because it is a very affordable chip yet still has all the features needed for the Mesh Potato but also because it is a chip that Atcom have indicate they have ready access to.
In order to confirm that the AR2317 would perform adequately, Elektra purchased a D-Link DIR-300 which is based on the AR2317. Elektra points out that the DIR-300:
is less then half the price of a Linksys WRT54GL and about a third the price of a Ubiquiti NS-2. It features 4MB flash and 16MB RAM, 4 port switch, 1 WAN port, a 180MHz Mips (Big Endian) CPU, Redboot Open-Source bootloader, a switched mode onboard DC/DC converter, one R-SMA antenna socket, on-board serial port and JTAG port. The device is much smaller than the Linksys WRT54GL, so outdoor boxes can be much cheaper and easier to mount than outdoor boxes for the Linksys.
As an added bonus, Elektra has posted instructions on how to set up OpenWRT a DIR-300 on the Village Telco wiki.
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Tags: AR2317, Atheros, D-Link, Mesh Potato
4 Responses to «OpenWRT on a D-Link DIR-300»
December 01, 2008 at 8:32 pm, Charles N Wyble said:
I'm not sure how one arrives at the conclusion that the DIR-300 is 1/2 price of the linksys. Amazon: Linksys wrt54gl (around 50.00) http://adjix.com/gtqm D-Link dir-300 (around 100.00) http://adjix.com/gtqn
December 02, 2008 at 9:20 am, Steve said:
I think this may come down to global supply chains. See here (http://tinyurl.com/dir-300) the DLink DIR-300 at amazon.co.uk for 22.95 GBP or about 35 USD. Amazon.co.uk sell the WRT54GL for about 45 GBP or about 68 USD http://tinyurl.com/wrt54gl-router.
September 04, 2009 at 6:12 pm, z22 said:
The DIR-300 is great for its price but I recently did some tests: http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=21504 The RP-SMA port is getting 5 dB less than the internal antenna, the internal antenna is unable to transmit (so you could not hack a coax to the internal antenna trace to use a higher gain antenna). I hope someone could check this.
September 05, 2009 at 5:19 pm, Elektra said:
The Atheros AR2317 chip features receiver-only diversity, so we obviously have got two RF ports on the chip and one port is RX only. According to D-Link the external antenna port of the DIR-300 has a receiver sensitivity of -89dBm @ 1Mbit. Since the antenna port is connected to the TX/RX port of the chip you are experiencing additional losses on the TX/RX port from a chip-internal switch that must switch between TX and RX. This switch is needed in every transceiver to stop transmitter power from entering the receiver. This switch adds some losses and hence reduces the RX sensitivity to some degree compared to the RX-only port. I don't know the receiver sensitivity of the TX/RX port of the AR2317, so I could place only a wild guess here about the differences introduced by the switch - maybe 3dB? Also I don't know how well the RF frontend design and components of the DIR-300 work. As usual in the industry manufacturers of such a cheap off-the-shelf product will try to minimize cost and will put cost over performance. -89dBm @ 1Mbit is not industry-leading performance but it is OK-ish for a SOHO product. The best WiFi radios I know offer -97dBm @ 1Mbit receiver sensitivity according to the manufacturer data sheets (the class of 100USD long range mPCI cards from Ubiquiti et al.)