Dragino MS12
The Dragino MS12 is based on an Atheros system-on-a-chip (SoC). It has a MIPS 4K processor, 8meg flash, and 32meg ram. Unlike most home routers, it also has 6 ESD shielded inputs, for connecting to any sort of sensor, and connectors for a daughterboard, that has access to the sensor inputs, and to the MIPS serial port, and some GPIOs that can be used as a SPI port. It is sold as an OEM device or offshore development kit, and comes with openWRT loaded, so you should have no difficulty using it. :)
At retail, you can get one of these as a Flukso Fluksometer, for home power measurement, or from Nodalis, where they are used as part of voip mesh networks.
Hardware
| Architecture | MIPS 4K |
|---|---|
| Vendor | n/a |
| Bootloader | RedBoot |
| System-On-Chip | Atheros AR2317 |
| CPU Speed | 180 MHz |
| Flash size | 8 MiB |
| RAM | 16 MiB/ changed to 32MB in v1.0 |
| Wireless | Integrated Atheros 802.11b/g |
| Ethernet | 1x RJ45 |
| USB | No |
| Serial | Yes |
| SPI | simulated by GPIO |
| JTAG | No |
- 12V power supply
- Antenna
- SPI-Bus
- External ESD shielded inputs
- daughterboard connector for personal projects (Arduino, avr, PIC etc.)
As an atheros board, the notes on Freedom CPE and Fonera are very relevant, and much more detailed.
Flash layout
Note, this is different from Fonera and Freedom...
RedBoot> fis list Name FLASH addr Mem addr Length Entry point RedBoot 0xA8000000 0xA8000000 0x00030000 0x00000000 vmlinux.bin.l7 0xA8030000 0x80041000 0x000D0000 0x80041000 rootfs 0xA8100000 0x8003E000 0x00260000 0x8003E000 FIS directory 0xA87D0000 0xA87D0000 0x0000F000 0x00000000 RedBoot config 0xA87DF000 0xA87DF000 0x00001000 0x00000000 RedBoot>
Upgrading
generic.sysupgrade Has pretty good information for this, but at least as of Backfire, you don't really need to do any tricks with memory or dropping network modules.
user@homecomputer$ scp openwrt-atheros-combined.squashfs.img root@router.ip.address:/tmp ... root@openwrt# sysupgrade -i -v /tmp/openwrt-atheros-combined.squashfs.img Keep config files over reflash (Y/n): Edit config file list (y/N): Saving config files... etc/nixio/.nixio_stamp etc/sysctl.conf etc/shells etc/rc.local etc/profile etc/passwd etc/inittab etc/hosts etc/group etc/dropbear/dropbear_rsa_host_key etc/dropbear/dropbear_dss_host_key etc/config/wireless etc/config/uhttpd etc/config/ucitrack etc/config/timeserver etc/config/system etc/config/network etc/config/luci etc/config/firewall etc/config/dropbear etc/config/dhcp Switching to ramdisk... Performing system upgrade... Unlocking vmlinux.bin.l7 ... Unlocking rootfs ... Writing from <stdin> to vmlinux.bin.l7 ... Writing from <stdin> to rootfs ... Appending jffs2 data from /tmp/sysupgrade.tgz to rootfs... Updating FIS table... Rebooting ... [ you will lose the connection here ]