Terrible Thoughts From a questionable mind

Posted on 09 Jun 2017

Kisbian is a project I’ve been working on in my spare time (which hasn’t been much) for some months now. A combination hardware/firmware project. Initially the firmware was based off of Kali Linux, and since been re-based on Raspbian by way of the wonderful pi-gen build environment. But, today I just want to touch on the hardware side of things. Mostly because the firmware build environment, while functional, is still pretty messy and not to a stage I am proud pushing it. I’m hoping to get some time soon to clean that up and share it (it’ll go to a Kisbian branch of my pi-gen fork fwiw).

Current Kisbian Build

Posted on 27 Sep 2016

I was recently turned on to the GL Innovations GL-AR150 DIY router. It’s an Atheros 9331 SoC with specs very similar to the Pineapple Nano. As has already been mentioned by other people ( here | here ) Patrick Sapinski has ported the pineapple firmware to the GL-AR150 ( Github ) and it works quite nicely. However, my experience was slightly different than others that have talked about it. So I thought I’d share my process in hopes it may assist others considering this route.

The installation is fairly straightforward. Download the latest firmware from Github, currently 1.0.6 v2. You’ll need to set a static ip on your host computer’s ethernet connection to 192.168.1.2 and connect it to the LAN port of the GL-AR150. While holding down the reset button, plug the USB power in. The red light will flash seven times and on the seventh flash the center green light will flash as well. Release the reset button and in a browser on your computer go to 192.168.1.1. If everything has gone correctly you will see the web UI for the devices U-Boot bootloader.

U-Boot Web UI