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WL500G
Vitals
- Manufacturer : Asus
- Model : WL500G
- Type : Access Point / Router
- External Antenna Jack : 1x RP-SMA
- USB Ports : 1x v1.1 on wl500g
- Parallel port : 1x on wl500g
- Wlan Chipset : Broadcom (mini pci)
- Power : 5v
- Transmit Specs :
- 19mW default
- 84mW max
- Recieve Sensitivity :
- -84dB @ 11Mbps
- Available New : Yes
- Average Price : $150
- Vitals last updated : 6/08/05
Official Details
From the Manufacturers
blurb...The Most Smart WLAN Router in the world
ASUS proudly announce the smartest WLAN Router in the world, WL-500g. It provides fast 54 Mbps date rate and all WLAN Router function, including DHCP server, IP sharing, Firewall, VPN pass through, esc. To ensure WLAN security, it also provides strong WPA and unique WLAN firewall, to protect the data from WLAN.
The Asus WL500G Broadband Router is really FIVE devices in one box.
- First, there's the Wireless Access Point, which lets you connect Wireless-G or Wireless-B devices to the network.
- There's also a built-in 4-port full-duplex 10/100 Switch to connect your wired-Ethernet devices. Connect four PCs directly, or daisy-chain out to more hubs and switches to create as big a network as you need.
- The Router function ties it all together and lets your whole network share a high-speed cable or DSL Internet connection, files, and other resources such as printers and hard disk storage space.
- It also has ability to be a print server or control device via the printer port
- Finally, USB Storage support for USB key's / Harddisks OR a USB Webcam, the storage support is even included on OpenWrt with webcam support on the horizon.
Pictures
Lots of internal WL500G PicsASUS Firmware
Select your ModelAlternate Linux Based Firmware
OPENWRT Support for wl500g For WL500G - OpenWRT provides an flexible, re-writable Linux distribution for the WL500G, this one includes madwifi to support the altheros a/b/g mini-pci chipsets and others.Support Forum
WL500 ForumMisc Notes & Links
wl500 Setup / TestingSerial port
There seems to be standard dual Uart's for possible dual serial support on this board.Here is a tutorial on how to add dual serial ports to this device:
Serial Port TutorialThis describes how to build an expansion board to add UARTs and a MAX232 chip to the WL500g. I assume that UARTs are specified because that particular hardware revision of the WL500g does not have UARTs on board. Can we get confirmation on which wl500g/gx's have UARTs on them?
If all this gets too hard, you could always plug in a USB-Serial adapter and compile in support for that instead.
USB-Serial TutorialDiscussion
17/7/05 Peter melb_ap : Standard openwrt for the broadcom chipset will run on this device, but there are also versions specifically compiled to take advantage of the mini-pci slot thats standard in the wl500g unit.
I've done some testing and found that the altheros a/b/g cards do work , but watch the revisions -
refer for supported cardsThis is a great little unit, for not much more than a WRT54G you get the big plus of being able to change the mini-pci radio for one with a high receive sensitivity or 802.11a support. You can also even add a memory key or hard disk storage, use the usb or printer port for control or content purposes, and do the normal routing / web functions.
I've been evaluating this unit and it could be another option for the node in a box project where the uplink is a bit more difficult or requires 802.11a
19/7/05 DanFlett : I've recently bought 2 of these for myself. I'm using one as my Internet router using modified firmware from
wl500g.info. I'm using their firmware version 1.7.5.9-5 which has the BPALogin software compiled in to allow use on Telstra Bigpond Cable. It seems to work fine for me. It doesn't show me what IP address I've received from Bigpond via DHCP in the web interface - but you can telnet in and do an 'ifconfig'.I intend to install OpenWRT on the other one and have a play - I'd like to compile in support for USB WLAN NICs so that extra radios can easily added via USB.
6/8/05 DanFlett : Just an update to say that I've installed OpenWRT WhiteRussian RC2 one of my WL500g units and it works very well. I've managed to mount a USB memory key and a 60GB hard drive (not at the same time - I don't have a USB hub yet). For some reason OpenWRT only reports 2.2MB of flash space onboard so it's getting cramped already. I'm going to investigate running a root filesystem off external flash memory once I'm sure I can easily "dual boot" OpenWRT - from either the internal flash or off an external flash. Once I've done that I'll install Samba on the external memory and share files off the 60Gb HDD. I'm also going to experiment with using a USB-Serial adaptor and a USB dial-up modem.
I followed this
HowTo - with the important difference is that my WL500g has an OHCI usb controller, not UHCI - so I added the usb-ohci module, not the uhci module.27/7/05 John Batstone, Node FOA, FOB, FOC: I have been playing with one of these little gems for the last couple of days and finding it a great unit.
I have flashed it with 1.9.2.7-6b firmware from the http://oleg.wl500g.info/ site (it still uses the ASUS web page interface with some added goodies). There is a nice little "howto" at
www.macsat.com/ipkg.php on how to setup a 256Meg USB stick or external USB drive and make it mount on bootup and install ipkg package system. I have even got midnite commander working on this for ease of use. So far the unit has been working great,and as Peter says, the Mitsubishi R100 is the same unit as the WL-500G, the cost of the Mitsubishi's are around the $110+ mark
6/8/05 - DanFlett : Wow John, where can you get them for $110? The cheapest I've seen the R100 is for about $125 on ausprices.com.au.
28/7/05 dna If you follow the "how to" John mentions above it's probably a good idea to skip making a swap partition on a flash drive. These embeded Linux versions don't need swap to run and it will probably destroy the flash drive very quickly. Linux allocates memory as much as possible, so the swap will be utilized. The Flash chip technology needs to do an erase before each write so everytime a page is swapped it will identify the sector, decide what needs to be kept, copy that data elsewhere, erase the sector then copy the data back. Flash drives have a finite erase/write life and are not really suitable for this type of use.
30/7/05 Peter melb_ap I just tested to see if this unit can work with a usb hub and yes it can. I used a powered usb hub in this test, but managed to run a webcam and memory key at the same time just with the standard firmware.
This means that the only real limit to what this unit can run will be memory although you could swap that to say a disposable 128Mb key.
What do you think dna?
30/7/05 dna Yeah, go for it! It would be interesting to see how long it did work for. May be a little slow paging in and out but probably OK for this sort of use.
2/9/05 Peter melb_ap Ok I have made some further progress in using these units with 802.11A
I setup a test link over 400Mtrs with an average LOS (ie lots of trees) using a cm9 mini pci card in the wl500g at each end using 18Db rojone panels. One Unit was in master mode (AP) and the other in managed mode (client). The OS was openwrt RC2 available at this
link.Signal on the client end was reporting -71 although i'm not sure how accurate that is, and i locked the rate at 24M to stop the constant rate changing.
Once this was done I achieved a pretty constant 800Kbytes per sec, more testing to follow.
Version 11 (old) modified Mon, 26 Jul 2021 12:49:29 +0000
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