I’ve got a weak spot for cheap, programmable hardware. In my junk drawer I’ve got a collection of Arduinos, Parallax Propellor boards, a couple of STM32 based ARM boards, and several Beagle Bone Blacks and Raspberry Pis. Today, another entry arrived: the WRTnode.

I’ve only had it out of the box for a few hours, and a little bit of tinkering, but here are my initial impressions.

A few basics first: it’s a small, cheap Linux computer. Nominally, the list price is supposed to be $25, but I ordered mine via the Amazon store and paid a bit of a premium: it cost $35, but shipped in two days via Amazon Prime. It comes in a small plastic box the size of an Altoids tin, and includes a little USB cable that allows you to chain an extra USB device to it, as well as provide power. I plugged mine into a little D-Link USB hub I had lying around. Seems to work fine.

In terms of capability, it falls somewhere between the Arduino and a Raspberry Pi. The processor is actually not ARM based, it’s an MTK MT7620N MIPS processor that runs at 580Mhz. It has a 512Mbit DDR2 RAM and 128Mbit of SPI flash ROM. This is quite a bit less than the Raspberry Pi, but it does have one cool added feature: it’s got a 300Mbit wireless networking chip on board which can do 802.11n. It also can handle USB host mode. Basically, you can think of this as the brains to a fairly reasonable wireless router. It’s a very small board, only 45mm x 50mm, and includes 23 GPIO pins, as well as JTAG and SPI.

Because of it’s rather limited memory, it can’t run full Debian. Instead, it runs the OpenWRT distribution, a small distribution which is often used on tiny embedded boxes that serve as routers. It runs BusyBox, has the tiny shell “ash”, as well as the LuCI web based configuration interface, which is based upon the uhttpd webserver.

Setting it up was pretty darned easy: I plugged the supplied USB cable into it, and the other end into my powered hub. A small blue LED comes on, and about 20 seconds later, a new wireless access point was visible called WRTnode9DDB. If you attach to that network, you are asked for a network password, which defaults to 12345678, and then you can telnet to the device, which defaults to IP address 192.168.8.1. You can login as root with no password. If you run passwd you can enter a new password, and then you can use ssh to connect to it.

Nifty! If you cat /proc/cpuinfo you can get information about the processor:

system type		: Ralink MT7620N ver:2 eco:6
machine			: WRTNODE
processor		: 0
cpu model		: MIPS 24KEc V5.0
BogoMIPS		: 398.13
wait instruction	: yes
microsecond timers	: yes
tlb_entries		: 32
extra interrupt vector	: yes
hardware watchpoint	: yes, count: 4, address/irw mask: [0x0ffc, 0x0ffc, 0x0ffb, 0x0ffb]
isa			: mips1 mips2 mips32r1 mips32r2
ASEs implemented	: mips16 dsp
shadow register sets	: 1
kscratch registers	: 0
core			: 0
VCED exceptions		: not available
VCEI exceptions		: not available

and ditto for cat /proc/meminfo:

MemTotal:          61852 kB
MemFree:           22516 kB
Buffers:            4828 kB
Cached:            17928 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:            14292 kB
Inactive:          10744 kB
Active(anon):       3772 kB
Inactive(anon):       76 kB
Active(file):      10520 kB
Inactive(file):    10668 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
SwapTotal:             0 kB
SwapFree:              0 kB
Dirty:                 0 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:          2296 kB
Mapped:             1960 kB
Shmem:              1568 kB
Slab:               6028 kB
SReclaimable:       1784 kB
SUnreclaim:         4244 kB
KernelStack:         296 kB
PageTables:          292 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:       30924 kB
Committed_AS:       6948 kB
VmallocTotal:    1048372 kB
VmallocUsed:        2204 kB
VmallocChunk:    1032516 kB

OpenWRT isn’t as full featured as some Linux distributions, but it’s not bad. It includes ssh, Python and Lua. It’s got vi. It runs its own small package manager called opkg, which has a pretty good selection of precompiled packages available for install (although its good to be careful, you don’t have an infinite amount of space). Scanning the list, it’s got installation packages for lighttpd, Asterix, and a bunch of other goodies.

I haven’t had a lot of time to mess with it, but I’m fairly impressed so far. I have a feeling I’m going to miss having a C compiler/make setup on the board, but it looks to be pretty simple to cross compile to it from my main Linux box. I have already rebuilt the distribution, and will probably try flashing it sometime soon.

If you are in the market for a little machine with features like this (esp. with WiFi), it might be worth it.