RouterIt takes a special kind of person to look at an everyday object and ask, “I wonder if I could run Linux on that?” This is exactly what the people of the OpenWrt project did and the results are really impressive.

What the OpenWrt project does is take a regular old wireless router (Wrt) and replace the standard firmware operating system with an open source Linux operating system. And, since this is open source, you can now play away to your heart’s content and fine tune the system all you want.

This is not a project for those of you who do not want to get your hands dirty. Rather, if you are looking for a way to both learn Linux and also develop a better understanding of embedded systems, this may be a great choice for you.

One of the really cool things that you can do with this project is extend the capabilities of the system so that it can do things that it was never originally intended to do. Some examples include:

I really wish that I had more time to work on my copy of this project (I’m using a Linksys WRT54G that I got for under $100). I have even found sites where you can fire up your soldering gun and do some pretty cool customizing such as:

So, if you want to pimp out your wireless router, this may be a perfect project for you!

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Tim Fehlman