JAWUG

Gigabyte GN-A16B 802.11b Access Point

Inside the box

Description

RTL8181 - CPU(MIPS), eth and wlan controller.
IC42S16400-7T - Times 2 for total of 16Mb RAM, or 8Mb RAM... seems to be 8.
SA2400ABC - wifi signal controller.
29LV1600ABCT-90 - non volatile storage 2 Mbytes.
RTL8201BL - Physical eth receiver.

Fun stuff

The rs-232 header pins are still intact.
A JTAG header is also available, but without pins.

The rs-232 should be usefull to see what the thing is doing, the JTAG should be usefull in case we kill the AP and need to manually reflash it.
Sadly unlike the newer Gigabyte AP's there does not seem to be any GPL code being released for it. So looks like it is going to have to be done the hard way.

RS-232 Interface

I turned my AP into a Brick. So getting the RS-232 working is somewhat more important now. I am currently using USB to talk to the AP. At the moment it is half working, I can read the output, just can't send anything back at this stage.

For those interested here is the output from the serial interface so far, the AP is booting the Minitar firware, not the Gigabyte firmware - the reason the AP is dead. Since the thing still boots it tells me that there is not much different between the various rtl8181 AP units and that with some careful compiling it should be possible to build a "generic" firmware which could run on any of them.

Some more serial output, this time from the non-broken AP. Notice how we get a # prompt! so nice.

• http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=ic42s16400-7t&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8
• http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=jtag++rtl8181&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1
• http://www.alltheweb.com/search?type=all&query=RTL8181+%2bJTAG