Moin

The background story cut short :
I've just read a nice review linked on dangerousprototypes about the carambola.

Having searched the web for quite a while now (about 1.5 years), the carambola seems like just the board I've been looking for.
Back the I needed a platform running linux, with wifi or at least ethernet, USB-host (for a webcam), some gpios and ... preferably I2C or spi as a main controller for a robot project.

Most boards available were either expensive and overkill or lacked some features I needed.
Finally I had to pause the project due to some hard work semesters at the university and a lack of money.

Until I found carambola today.
It looks like as if it was made to fit my design.

So and here comes the problem :
Last year I've been playing with some board I scavenged from a bunch of old routers.
Mostly braodom soc with a mips or arm cpu.
I wanted to get a some experience with embedded linux before buying a board.

The most important lesson I learned from these experiments was that using (broadcom) socs has 2 major disadvantages.
1. The total lack of datasheets.
After googling 2 days all you've found is some flyer with a block digram, and two pages of marketing stuff.
Not even a pinout or voltages levels and other stuff might want to know about the hardware.
Emailing broadcom is useless until you buy >1k units a year.
I've already found the preliminary datasheet here on the forum, so I know the situation is a bit better for the soc used here.
I'd even say that datasheet is sufficient for me now.

2. The lack of proper drivers
For the router boards I was using, I had to use a stonage 2.4 kernel with a gcc 3.3.
To compile gcc3.3 I needed gcc 3.4 and for 3.4 I needed something smaller 4.0 .... toolchain madness ...
That wasn't even the biggest problem.
The reason why I needed all that old stuff were the drivers shipped with the linux sources released for those boards.
The manufacturer of the boards/routers were only allowed to ship precompiled object files for the broadcom drivers.
Those files got linked in during the kernel build process.
Broadcom had no interest in building newer object files, since they don't sell these socs anymore.
The router manufacturers had stopped development once a they had a working version.
Needless to say there aren't any opensource drivers around ...

So for me this boiled down to :
Want to use a newer compiler ? No chance ...
Want to move on to a newer kernel ? No chance ...
Need a more recent uclib ? No chance with that old kernel/gcc ...
Compile the software XY for it ? No chance due to old uclib
You see the pattern here.

I threw away most of the boards, not because of 'bad' hardware but because of a lack for drivers that work with recent kernels.

So long post, short question here :
Hows the situation for the RT3050 ?
Are there usable drivers in the kernel already ?
If not in what form are they provided by ralink ?

It's a nice board already, I would be really awesome if I still can still compile a linux with recent (I mean recent for embedded linux) kernel for it, in 2 years.

Greetings
Sebastian

Hello,

I just stumbled upon 8devices and I must agree this projects sounds very promising.

As for you question: Ralink is one of a few hardware manufacturers that is somehow concerned about the community of open source developers and from time to time puts driver code under the GPL and/or releases the firmware. They even do some patching of the official kernel sources http://www.pro-linux.de/news/1/16692/ra ... eiber.html

See:
http://www.ralinktech.com/en/04_support ... php?sn=501

Openwrt seem's to have a good support for RT3050 chips including USB: http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start
But if there are any known limitations, I'd also like to know from the developers.

So the whole package of carambola and openwrt seem's like a good thing to go for low-cost embedded wireless development. I'm just a bit curious if the openwrt packages ramips packages do all work for carambola? If yes what is the https://github.com/8devices/packages rep for? Are there many customizations necessary for carambola?

Keep up the great work and thank you for your help!

Cheers,
Mochtu