Hi everyone,
OpenWRT is a very important part of OpenWISP and the OpenWISP community is participating for the second time in the Google Code-In program with the aim of teaching young pre-university students how to contribute to Open Source projects and hopefully teach them how to use OpenWRT and OpenWISP.
The first time we participated we achieved better results than what we expected, so this year I would like to try to convince some students to get some cheap devices instead of using only OpenWRT on virtualbox.
If we manage to make some students excited about hacking OpenWRT we may turn some of them into stable contributors for the long term, which I believe would be good because I haven't seen many young people hacking OpenWRT recently, they almost all end up working on javascript stuff (so inflated and so boring!).
So my question is simple: what cheap hardware can we recommend them to buy?
Keep in mind their age is between 13 and 17 and they come from all over the world, the most being from Asia (particularly India) so their budget will be very low (and they'll have to convince their parents to give them money to buy these devices, which may not be easy). The devices don't need to be performant. They just need to be easy to reflash with OpenWRT and should work decently to bring up an access point, an 802.11s mesh and similar things.
Best regards
Federico