WRT54GL v1.1 mods

[PandoraXero]

ok, I just got my hands on a Linksys WRT54GL and i'm feeling like voiding the warranty on this one and building in the following:

2 DE-9 male connectors (for serial connection, shown here)
1 DE-9 female connector (for JTAG, using the unbuffered design shown here and designing a custom DE-9-M to DB-25-M cable to connect that port to my computer
1 SD card slot (design shown here)

does anyone here have experience doing hardware mods to these things that might be able to give me a few pointers in addition to what the openwrt documentation says?

what type of solder should i use for this, and will i need a fine-tip soldering iron? (some of the parts look rather small)

also, i'm about to go to sleep, so if i don't respond right away... you know why.

[PandoraXero]

what i get for posting in the middle of the night.... bump.

[Bolweevil]

Will early morning be any better than middle of the night?

As for your assembly, it's hard to say.

How good are you at soldering? If you're fairly decent, you should be able to solder the serial and jtag without too much difficulty or the need for smaller tip on the iron, You would be soldering the posts from underneath right? There's nothing on the underside of the board to get in the way of easy soldering.

Although there's really no sense of scale in the images, so I may be wrong about that. It looks like theres enough room on the board to get an iron in somewhat safely, especially if the pins are meant to penetrate through to the under side of the board and not be surface mounted.

I can't say for sure about the card reader though. I see no images as to where that is supposed to be mounted.

[PandoraXero]

its more the SD card assembly i'm worried about. connections running all over the place. that and I'm not sure if a shared ground with the serial connections is a good idea, either.

[Novator]

I modded mine, but a softmod not a hardware mod. I put a custom version of Tomato firmware that allows for multilink pppoe. It's awesome I have 10 meg / 1.6 meg net connection with it.

[PandoraXero]

Novator

I modded mine, but a softmod not a hardware mod. I put a custom version of Tomato firmware that allows for multilink pppoe. It's awesome I have 10 meg / 1.6 meg net connection with it.

I'm fully aware of the firmware mods. I want all the functionality i can get though.

[grayfaded]

PandoraXero

its more the SD card assembly i'm worried about. connections running all over the place. that and I'm not sure if a shared ground with the serial connections is a good idea, either.

Common ground is usually shared. Out of necessity more than anything else. You can minimize signal crossover, but with all the mods you're planning, I don't know how bad it might be.

[PandoraXero]

update:

After struggling with the SD/MMC mod for damn near 4 days, i finally got it to work. the JTAG mod, i can only HOPE i'll never have to use it, and the serial ports... ugh, I didn't read the documentation carefully enough. its 3.3volt TTL ... i'd need to purchase a converter to make it RS232 compatible

OpenWRT is working nicely. It seems to be a fine Linux distro. my plans with it include stateful packet inspection, and, if possible, a port of the ffxi decompression/decryption algo to MIPS (courtesy ProjectXI) such that it'll run on the WRT54GL with OpenWRT, and save the decompressed/decrypted data to the SD Card (2GB, i could have got 4GB, but i wasn't sure how well it'd work)

I also spent 7USD on a pair of High-gain antennas. given the price, i question the quality, but they seem to work