Playing around with the TP-LINK TL-WR703N

If you haven’t heard of these little guys they’re great! Packing 400MHz ARM (Atheros AR7240), Ethernet connector, 802.11 b/g/n wlan, USB port, 4MB flash and 32MB RAM into a tiny little housing.

I recently bought one of these routers to play around with for setting up a wifi hotspot for all my devices whilst travelling. As my phone has a micro sim it is not that easy to just buy a sim wherever I am for some pay-as-you go internet. I ordered the device from China (read: e-bay) and it got here quickly enough. Unfortunately the firmware loaded on the router presented me with a web interface in Chinese, with no option to change it. I managed to find the firmware update page and flashed the OpenWrt firmware, which to be honest I would have done pretty quickly anyway. Now I have an open linux based router which is perfectly hackable and perfectly usable for £15. Great! It works really nicely as a companion to a Nexus 7 or any other tab without 3G support and if you can’t tether using your phone for some reason. I haven’t done anything very exciting with it yet but its another great tool added to my toolbox.