[Commotion-dev] What would you do with the USB port on your Commotion access point?

[Ben West]

Hi All,

For the past few months, I've been using a heavily modified derivative of
Commotion-OpenWRT on Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH units which I use as gateway
routers in WasabiNet.  These units happen to have a USB port, which works
just fine and dandy under OpenWRT, both for USB peripherals and mounting
USB disks (presumably both solid state or HD).

I'm using these USB ports to monitor APC battery back-up supplies on the
gateway routers, but that's pretty boring.  I've tried asking a couple
times at the hacker space here in St. Louis what neat uses folks may have
for a USB port on their Internet router, e.g. file server, or miscellaneos
remote control, but the interest there hasn't been strong.

The Buffalo routers are neat, but even neater looks to be this 40$US unit,
a TP-Link TL-MR3020 :
http://www.microcenter.com/product/379216/Portable_3G-375G_Wireless-N_Router

I do believe Musti was showing off something similar to this at the IS4CWN
last year.  Don't let the '3G connectivity' nonsense distract you; this is
a cute little 802.11n ath9k-based radio with a USB port, and it looks like
it will run OpenWRT with some encouragement.  Furthermore, a 2nd USB port
can be had with some soldering and elbow grease.
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3020

Likewise, the TL-WR703N is an equivalent unit:
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n

What could this USB port do for you?

- Filesystem for squid proxy? (Probably not very practical)
- 3G/4G modem for Internet gateway?
- USB sound adapter for streaming MP3 applications?
- Control this desktop rocket launcher
http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/8a0f/ ?

-- 
Ben West
http://gowasabi.net
ben at gowasabi.net
314-246-9434
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