Anything I can do with a WRT20n router?

AChickFillA · February 18, 2020

I bought one of those at goodwill for around 3 CAD, but after I got home I realized I already had another spare router that was a lot better than the wrt120n for the project I was working on (and by that I mean that it supported openwrt). However, I wanted to find a way to still get some fun out of it, so I started looking around trying to find either custom firmwares or hacks with this router. I found a series of blog posts made by devttys0 where he played around with the firmware and boot loader. He actually ended up writing some really neat scripts that allow you to remove/change the admin password on the router remotely (so don't buy this little guy for anything other than tinkering with it).

I still wanted to try out installing openwrt or something thought, so I started searching for guides or something on how to do it to other similar devices, and while there are some out there, I couldn't find any that would work in this case. I did find a comment on this devttys0 post where someone asked about backing up the ART partition on the CPU and using it to increase the flash size. And that's where I'm at right now. If I manage to read the SPI flash chip on the board using my arduino, I'll see if I can at least replicate what he did in those posts. I actually no next to nothing about reverse engineering, but I don't see the harm on playing around with Cutter and seeing what happens.

But as you may have noticed by now, I don't really have much experienced with embedded development, so in case you were bored by my nonsense, do you guys have any suggestions about what I could do with it? (and no, I wont throw it in the garbage, worst case scenario I'll keep it as an emergency switch)