> On Wednesday 06 Feb 2013, Brendan Simon (eTRIX) wrote: >> I'm looking for a very small and very low cost SBC with a USB host port, >> serial port (UART or RS485) and Ethernet (10 or 10/100). The purpose is >> to bridge between two systems -- one system is a piece of equipment that >> only has a USB device port (serial protocol) and the other is a master >> controller which can have Ethernet and/or RS485. >> >> I was hoping to also add other services such as :- web browser, FTP >> server, etc, which led me towards an openwrt solution as possibility. >> >> The best board I've come up with is a TP-Link TL-WR703N. It is cheap, >> has Ethernet (and wifi) and an internal serial, but the internal serial >> is just a couple of pads (I'd prefer a proper connector) and I'm not >> sure I can modify it for RS485 (e.g. provision for a Tx/Rx enable >> signal). Two serial ports and/or two usb ports would be nice but not >> necessary. >> >> I was wondering if anyone could suggest other boards/products to look at :) >> >> Thanks, Brendan. > Have you looked at the carambola? The current version has some problems > with USB (earthing problems on the shield), but a new version is due this > month. They use a version of OpenWRT as firmware.
Haven't come across the Carambola. It looks interesting and reasonably priced. Main features are 2 x Eth LAN (10/100 I presume), 1 x WLAN (802.11bgn), USB OTG, 2 x UART, SPI and I2C. It certainly could do the job. Price 22 euro, down to 17 euro in quantities of 100. According to openwrt site, I found that TP-Link TL-MR3020 is almost identical to the TL-WR703N (I actually have no idea what the difference is. maybe just the switch on the side ??) but it has a 4 pin internal serial connector. I can buy this in Australia at a retail store for around A$35. I've seen the WR703N in China wholesale sites for under US$20. I would think it should be possible to source MR3020 for under US$30 (tho I've only found them around US$60 which makes no sense). Another alternative is the RaspberryPi (1 x Eth Lan, 2 x USB, GPIO connector with UART, SPI, I2C) at around A$36. Finally, found a 16-bit PIC board (NetCruzer) with Eth Lan, USB OTG, and 2 IO connectors with mappable GPIO/peripherals (4 uarts, 9 pwm, 2 spi, 2 i2c). Cheers, Brendan. _______________________________________________ openwrt-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-users
