(Dear Admins, I hope I do not break any rules with this.).

We bought a whole bunch of motorola WR850G v2 for a vertical market project that needs some specialized packages. Due to that project, I visit the forums regularly and got a lot of help from here. However I noticed that a lot of ppl have installation problems. I would like to help out in 2 ways

1) Providing a pre-configured router
2) Providing #1 in a cost-effective manner. We literally buy hundreds of these a year and therefore have cost advantages for buying in bulk.

I would offer a new, unused preconfigured RC5 router (Motorola WR850G v2) for about $50 plus shipping (About $3-4 in the continental US. Shipping outside the US would also be possible).

This would help the motorola router users because any issues that we see in that particular hardware version would have been solved or a work-around been found because we use lots of those routers. I want to get everyone's opinion before I put this offer out there and configure our website to accept such orders from this community. Please note that is a way of my company to give back to the community.

Nice. Go for it.

If you have a lot of experience with the WR850G then you should pour some of it into the OpenWRT documentation as well:
http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Har … ola/WR850G

Ivoshiee - thanks for the words of compliments

I'm definitely going to be updating that page...like I said before we got a lot of help from this community and we (my company and I) would like to give back. In fact the price of $50 is lower than what that hardware unit goes for. Amazon has it for 64.99 plus shipping. And they have them out of stock :)

"Motorola 498417-001-00  amazon.com
Wireless Broadband Router Only $64.99 (or order used)."

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000D … 8?n=172282

=> I would also like to make openwrt more mainstream. Why cant we have a linksys, a motorola, a netgear and an openwrt router sitting side by side at BestBuy? What do you guys think we need to do to make this product mainstream? I can help out from a hardware, software testing and basic software dev side. Do we have any marketing or sales people out here who can help?

=> Oh I forgot to mention that we could reach a stage where the volume justifies OEMing this product. It would be kind of cool to have a pure OpenWRT router with a lot more memory and a faster CPU :)

(Last edited by LSU_guy on 8 May 2006, 02:05)

Does anyone else have any comments on this? Looks like there isnt a need for such a product

I thnk it's a niche...  If you offer them for $50, I think people would buy them.... But remember, most people probably end up here *after* buying an AP.

So you need to get out front and get them *before* they buy the AP.  Heck, I would have bought one, but now I have 4.....

--Yan

Do you know the shipping cost to germany?
I think that could also be a reason for so less comments, because many people here aren't from the US.

Gunni - The US post office can do it for about $5-7. However, if we reach a higher volume level with europe, I can treat this as a distribution product and ship about 100 of them out to a distribution facility and have them ship out to local destinations in europe. It doesnt take that much to reach this level. At about 50 orders per month, I could start doing that. That could further lower the shipping price.

Yan - At $50, I would hope to reach a lot of people initially and then have these people consider this router before purchasing one out there. I was also hoping to reach a higher volume level with motorola and hence OEM their product. At that point we can add the following things (included in the $50)
1) Faster Processor
2) More memory so we could use more packages
3) Added USB port
4) Possibly adding an RS232 port.

What do you guys think?

I would buy a bunch of those for some small projects I have in mind. (Well, I wanted to buy just one too, and now have 4 of those openwrt-cabable router ;-) And knowing before buying that the hardware has no problem with OpenWRT would be an argument to spread the word.

And for developing a serial-port would be great, since I proved more than once that I am a soldering idiot. But for the end-User it is not that interesting and would just increase costs.

Nice features to have, but do you plan to add those functions by yourself or let the Motorola do it?

I would let motorola do it for me and then OEM the product. So we would have the first pure OpenWRT router.

We may be interested in this....  We would need WDS functionality, and a removable antenna...  We would want to put this unit into a NEMA-4X enclosure.

If this gells, please contact me off list....  Our quantities aren't great, but we could be doing anywhere from a dozen to 600 a year...

--Yan

I think it is a great idea; a few weeks ago I was wondering how to make all the community to buy from the same hardware vendor in the way that this vendor could contact a chinese company to make it build the perfect openwrt router at very cheap costs (something like 20-30$ at the end-user)...
Maybe the best way to gather the community consensus is to find a way to sold a router at very low costs (50$+ 7$ shipping, could be fine, but what about VAT and Custom?); AND to contribute the project pushing one of the wireless chip producers to release their source code or the needed specs to develop one.
Such a project, after a few thousands of units sold, could even lead chipset producers to release detailed infos about their chipset (otherwise this vendor could choose to use a different chipset...).
I mean... this is the only way to fully release the freedom of wireless as at the moment even OpenWrt can't do much without support from chipset vendors; don't misunderstand me, OpenWrt it is a miracle of technology, but depends too much on Linksys, Broadcom, Atheros and so on... if they decide to stop producing routers or retire the binary driver... moreover many of the wireless functionalities can't be used as there's no way to understand how the have been implemented... and so on.

As an example at the moment our small community (Italy) uses WRT54GL but I would be happy to switch to other routers as: a) we can't find them in shops; b) they cost too much (75-80 euros, shipping costs and taxes included). We also have the problem that many of the supported routers aren't sold in Italy and many of them even in Europe.
So the cost lever could be enough to reach a minimum level of consensus, but you should also prove step by step to offer freedom to this community. IMHO.

ciao

Wallace78

Hi,

I would love it if I could have a guarenteed OpenWRT compatible router, especially if it was marketed as such. I'm currently working on a couple of projects using (for now) WRT54G(L)'s but I'm always worried that I may not be able to get hold of any more.

An OpenWRT router would be a godsend, especially if it came with serial headers for console debugging, etc.

An open router by the community, for the community (and a bit of profit for LSU_guy! - I'd definately be sending money his way to buy a router like this for that price!). Great idea!

Yan - I have sent you a reply via email. I just wanted to post here to let you know (in case you didnt get my email due to some anti-spam mechanism).

Wallace - the end goals are the same. We all want a cheap router with everything on it being open-source. I agree with you - the volume would actually force our chipset manufacturers to release more info to us. And since we release this to the world, this would ensure that more people switch to openwrt :).

You raised a very important question on customs and VAT. I have to fill out a customs form to send anything out of the country. However, if I'm only sending one unit per package, I can claim it as a sample with a $0 value. This lets me ship it out to you, however individual countries decide if they really want to treat this as a $0 item. Will this work for Europe or Italy?

Thanks for the reply. I actually switched from Linksys for the exact same reason. I was using them as cheap router manufacturer and switching their software to openwrt. However with their hardware v5, they lowered their memory and switched to VxWorks. I then researched more routers and found motorola. Right now, I have put in some calls to to make sure motorola can handle the supply. And to work out the transformers for non-US based routers.

Please note that the first version would be a plain version of motorola with openwrt. However, the goal would be to add the USB and RS232 in a few months provided that we can get enough interest.

(Last edited by LSU_guy on 11 May 2006, 19:57)

As long as we're asking for custom features, I'd like to suggest PoE for router power (not PoE outputs which would require a major redesign.)

To reduce costs on the serial port, how about a .100 header with standard pin config like you find on motherboards?   Everybody has easy access to those cables.   Change to a 5V UART while we're at it.

(Last edited by recordista on 12 May 2006, 03:21)

I'm very interested, but I noticed in the table of hardware that the wr850g has the adm6996L switch. Isn't this the funky bastard that doesn't handle vlan tagging correctly? If so it won't work for me.

- DL

I'm not sure what the problem is with vlan tagging - perhaps you can elaborate a little more on it?

See this thread. Apparantly the chip doesn't support a default untagged vlan on an otherwise tagged port. I'm considering switching over to all tagged vlans at some point but with my current config this poses problems.

- DL

Good News!!

OK everyone...I worked out a lot of things over the last few days. I have 100 Motorola WR850Gs sitting here as we speak (think of all that processing power...lol). Wooohooo! The $50 price is still a go and you will have a choice of RC4 or RC5 preloaded. For now, you will have to email me for your orders. I will work on the website in the next few days and get that up there.

I'm still working on things for Europe...I need a transformer that works there. But other than that, everything is a go there. If anyone in Europe needs this, email me and we will work something out...I will need to hand hold that a little more than usual.

Email: openwrt@energyplusautomation.com

Following some careful reading of the horribly written datasheet, I'm not sure that the chip actually can't do this (tagged and untagged on the same port), at least on traffic that goes thru the cpu (versus lan/lan traffic).

This implies to me that if in "bypass mode", and with proper grouping and PVID's that I could accomplish what I'm doing on the BCM switch routers. I may have to pick up a WR850G and experiment, although just switching my network over to fully tagged may be less work

- DL

dl - contact me offline and we can figure out how to get you one of the motorola's if you dont have one already

> dl - contact me offline and we can figure out how to get you one of the motorola's if you dont have one already

Thanks, I think I'll just order a couple from you. The vlan thing isn't an issue for my client setup, only for AP's, and within a few months won't matter any more for my AP's either as I'm going fully tagged eventually.

- DL

dl - thats great. The more orders we can get the better. I need to do something with my 100 routers