My Soekris Net 4521 got here Tuesday and I’ve now had a few days to play with it. I’m quite impressed with quality of the board and it’s perfomance. I’ve got it booting the Stompbox version of Pebble Linux off a 128MB CF card.
It’s equipped with two pc-card slots and one mini-PCI slot. The cpu is an AMD 486 at 133Mhz and it’s loaded with 64MB of RAM. The whole thing runs off of 12-54V DC so it can be powered quite nicely in the car or with most any wall wart you have laying around. One of the PC-Card slots is taken up with my EVDO card (cellular broadband internet). I hope to put a USB adapter in the 2nd slot and put a wifi adapter in the mini-PCI.
I had some issues getting dnscache to listen on port 53 so I tossed it out and installed dnsmasq. I’ve got it routing the local net to the internet over EVDO and just need to find a mini-PCI wifi card with a Prism2 chipset to make it replace my WIFI Access Point.
I’ll post a proper howto sometime in the near future and give some updates on how it performs when we’re camping this weekend.
4 Comments
Did you ever get the USB adapter connected and working?
–dio
I haven’t gotten the USB adapter yet. It’s on my list of things to do someday but life’s been too busy to make it a priority yet. Probably this fall when things slow down a little and we get back into the camping and travelling mode.
I will also be writing a follow up article on switching to Sprint’s EVDO and setting up bandwidth tracking.
I’d be interested in how the Sprint EVDO is playing for you. I’ve got the Verizon KPC650, and the performance is usable. Adjusting the packet size to 2048 has helped a bit.
We’re heading to BlackHat in Las Vegas on 07.29.2006 with the 4521 in the RV. It’s the 1st roadtrip with it acting as the ppp/wifi router.
I picked up an Adaptec dual-port USB cardbus, but I can’t get the right combination of modules to load and recognize it. I’ve got a mouse-like DeLorme USB GPS, but without the USB support, the GPS is useless.
I’ll let you know if I make any headway with the Adaptec card.
–dio
BlackHat sounds like fun. Too many things to do this summer to take more than a day off here and there
I’m going to hunt around for a USB adapter soon and see if I can get it working. I’d love to be able to attach a a GPS mouse and webcam to the stompbox. I imagine I’ll have to setup the older compiler and compile my own kernel to support the camera.
Maybe it’s time to get a 1G flash and put a larger more complete distro on it. It sure would be nice to run debian stable or Ubuntu server on it.
Post a Comment