OpenWRT and the Serial Console of the TL-MR3220 Router

The TP-LINK router TL-MR3220 is a very cheap (around €22 in Germany) yet feature-rich wireless 802.11n router that supports the open source OpenWRT firmware. It offers a USB port, allowing a bunch of additional peripheral hardware to be connected. Installing the matching OpenWRT nightly build was easy enough, the original firmware offers to do so using the standard web interface.

I was thinking about connecting one of them to an Arduino in a project to come. The integrated serial interface seems to be the obvious way to achieve this. The router’s board readily exposes the interface, so I added a 4-pin header to do a few tests. The pin-out of the interface is documented in the OpenWRT wiki. Using a standard FTDI adapter I then got access to the router’s serial console. From here it should not be to hard to use the same interface to connect to an Arduino instead.

Seeeduino Stalker: Writing to the SD Card

After I managed to upload the first sketches to the Seeeduino Stalker last week, I was eager to try the special features offered by this special kind of Arduino platform. I decided to try writing to an SD card first and followed the example included in the Stalker’s documentation. Which turned out to not work at all.

A couple of hours later and looking for errors in all the wrong places, I finally managed to find out how to use the FileLogger library:

  1. The SD card needs to be FAT16 formatted.
  2. The file that the the Arduino is writing to must exist 615-544-6598 , the library does not create files.
  3. The file must not be empty, it must contain at least one byte of data.

If these conditions are met, the following tiny sketch will work just fine and append data to the file:

#include "FileLogger.h"

void setup(void)
{
 byte buffer[] = "Hello World!";
 FileLogger::append("data.txt", buffer, 12);
}

void loop(void) {}

Update 10/8/12: Please note that this example will work with version 1.0 of the Stalker, only. For newer versions of the board you should try sadfatlib.

Connecting to the Seeeduino Stalker

A few weeks ago, Seeed Studio were celebrating their anniversary with a bunch of limited offers. Among other things, I acquired a pair of Seeeduino Stalkers v1.0 with an Atmega 168. Unfortunately, the serial interface on those boards is not labeled. So it took me a while to figure out how to connect the FTDI breakout board. With a small adapter board, programming the Stalkers with the Arduino IDE now works like a charm. (Select board type “Duemilanove w/ 168”.)