RouterBoard 493G question and AR8327 hardware to donate..

[Luiz Otavio O Souza]

On 12 March 2014 20:49, Ben Perrault <ben.perrault at gmail.com> wrote:
> All,
>
> So I have a MikroTik RB493G, and I while I've got no problems networking booting it or getting an NFS root, via a slightly modified AR71xx config and Adrian's excellent build scripts.
>
> But what I would like to do is get a bootable kernel / MFS image onto that box so it's self contained. I've tried booting OpenWRT onto it and using their wget2nand to flash various types of images onto it - with no avail. ( if only there was uboot for these things )
>
> I've searched the archives and found mention, from Luiz, on creating a yaffs image and write it to the NAND. But I'm not entirely sure how to do this ( i've looked at the docs, and am still a little lost ). It was for a RB450, but it seems most things regarding the RB450/450G apply to the RB493G.
>
> So does anyone have an idea on how to do that? Is it even possible?


Yes, it is possible, but as you see, we don't have all the tools to do
that right now.

On my RB450 days (~2009) i remember that you need a 4MB YAFFS2 image
containing the kernel (just /kernel) right after the bootloader and
the RB will boot from that image. The kernel file can be gziped, which
helps a lot.

I need to add and test some serialisation on SPI bus so NAND and the
MMC/SPI (and gpio for CPLD) can coexist without problems.

But, the thing is, to test the SPI serialisation i need GPIO interrupt
support, which is the next on my list (and then the SPI stuff).

Regards,
Luiz

>
>
> Additionally - in a few weeks - I'll have a spare MikroTik CRS-125-24g-1S-2HnD-In ( which is similar to the RB2011, but with a 24 gigabit switch ports and a nifty programable LCD panel ) that I would like to donate to get support for it. It's AR8327 based, which I know just got support in head. I'm assuming adrian would be the person to talk to, but I could be wrong. Is there interest? It would be a neat box for soft switching stuff, for sure.

I have seen one of those, the LCD with touchscreen is... appealing =)
The first thing i could thought was how i could get the FreeBSD logo
on that screen =)