Last weekend, I fought off my head cold and drug my body off to the Maker Faire to get inspired by the projects. I saw some good stuff this year, but didn’t really have a lot of time to talk to people and get in any deep discussions. One of the neater projects was courtesy of Jeff, Tony and Kylie at the mightyOhm blog. They built a very stylish looking Wifi Radio, using an Asus WL-520UG router as its core. I surfed over to their blog, and they have a really excellent 10 part series on how they did it. Awesome.

mightyOhm » Blog Archive » We rocked the Maker Faire!.

I’ve goofed around quite a bit with the Linksys WRT54GL and related routers, using alternative firmware, and I highly recommend them. The nifty thing about the WL-520UG that they used is that it has a USB port, which can be used to add all sorts of peripherals, like sound cards (for their projects) but also webcams and the like. Looking on newegg’s website, I see them available for $44.99, but also with a $10.00 mail in rebate. Verah nice.

Addendum: Jeff has a nice little writeup with lots of pictures on why and how you might want to hack one of these routers. Nifty.