alternatives to the WL-520gU

[janur55]

Hi,

I managed yesterday to install and configure my Linksys WRT160NL as an Internet Radio. It works OK, but I have a question.

How many processes MPD needs. If I run a PS, it lists 4 MPD processes with the same size. Is this OK?
Now, I have about 2% free memory and also 2% free program space, and it's not playing anything.

Thank you.

----
D3S

waw its work??...i confuse to use what router should i buy,because wl-520gu its hard to find
maybe can you give me some photos of your internet radio
your project is based on jeff packages??

[gerben]

@janur55
Just look at the list of supported routers on http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start

But because you can't just use Jeff's image on all router, I would pick one that has at least 8 MB of Flash-memory. That way you can use the latest openwrt image, and still fit the more bloated version of MPD.

Just loop up the the ones in the list, at your favorite store. I myself wanted something more powerful for my second project, and it took me a lot of time to find the right router, for the right price, that was available here in the netherlands.
In the end I bought a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH for around 60 euro. It's a beast compared to the wl520gu. 400 MHz, 64 MB Ram, 32 MB Flash, more than I will ever need I think.

What country do you live in?

[Braklet]

I took at look at (US) Newegg's current (December 2011) offerings and found US$14 WL-500W refurbs.

This page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_routers claims the 500W has double the memory of our 520GU and perhaps a slightly faster processor. There is a wireless driver issue with OpenWrt, but the 500W radio is a Mini PCIe card and can be changed. For $14 I'm willing to experiment.

It is very easy to tap out memory on the 520GU (yeah, I tried to build/load the latest version of MPD, too).

I was able to get Squeezeslave running on my 520GU but it isn't stable. Seems to be a resource contention problem, whether that turns out to be RAM or CPU remains to be seen. I hope I can use my 500W as a homebrew Squeezebox.

[Braklet]

There is a wireless driver issue with OpenWrt, but the 500W radio is a Mini PCIe card and can be changed

I can successfully run Backfire brcm-2.4 target on my 500W and get wireless with the proprietary Broadcom wl driver. But the system doesn't enable my USB audio card, still tracking that problem down.

I plan to attempt integrating the newest Broadcom driver code into a Backfire brcm47xx build (2.6 kernel) but wanted to verify audio play first.

[Braklet]

In case anybody Googles the WL-500W and hits this thread, I was able to stream audio on mine using the latest Backfire brcm-2.4 target. I ended up building my own although you could probably use the openwrt.org binaries as well.

You must load the "kmod-brcm-wl-mimo" driver to get wireless working on the 500W.

You must load the "kmod-usb-uhci," "kmod-usb-uhci-iv" and "kmod-usb2" drivers to get USB working on the 500W. This platform doesn't need the "kmod-usb-ohci" driver.

I ended up having to use ALSA, so load "kmod-alsa" and you'll find "alsa-utils" and "alsa-lib" useful.

"kmod-usb-audio" and "kmod-alsa" seem to conflict on the brcm-2.4 target. I didn't unload "kmod-usb-audio," I just commented out the "audio" invocation in /etc/modules.d/60-usb-audio and that allowed all programs that default to ALSA to work again. I believe OSS programs will work fine as well, since /dev/sound/* is populated as expected.

The version of MPD built in latest Backfire still causes trouble; it doesn't handle HTTP MP3 streaming correctly despite listing support for both in "mpd --version." So I had to use the following command to stream audio from my Squeezebox Server:

wget http://<squeezebox server>:9000/stream.mp3 -O -| madplay -

No remote volume control or player synchronization but this is better than nothing.

[Indoorser]

Yesterday I successfully turned my D-Link DIR615-C1 into WiFi Radio (without controlling hardware part implemented yet).
Now I am happy with sky.fm Smooth Jazz playing in my kitchen .

Special thanks to Jeff, and all you guys whos' information was incredibly useful and gave me the clues how to pack all the stuff I need into 4Mb flash using backfire 10.03.1-rc5.

[bartoo]

http://www.alfa.com.tw/in/front/bin/ptd ... ory=107225
What about this one? Do you think is possible to connect the lcd screen??

[djmasterg]

Jsut bought asus wl 500gp v2, will let you know how will it go with it. It has large flash and ram - http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/asus/wl500gp

[mightyohm]

The Wl-500gp v2 works fine, I used one for the wifi radio project before transferring my code over to the 520gu.

[djmasterg]

Thanks Jeff,

Have you got by any chance an Openwrt compiled for wl500gp v2? If not, could you guide me on which compilation to use ?