What to do with older devices

Yeah that's what i ended up doing but i have 3 and only 1 friend that wants it for the same reasons i mentioned myself above, its not easy to find but i will try.

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Friends are hard to come by....

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True!
Particularly tech-savvy friends who would want OpenWrt for their home routers!

Keep them for a lanparty :grinning:

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Ok, so apparently all the routers are old, very old and about 10 mbps etc. so no one wants that these days.

The next move would be to use them as a door way info firmware study and gene pigs, so how do i dump their memory etc. whats the starting procedure for OpenWrt i couldn't find one.

https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/hardware/port.serial

My ADSL is 15 mbps, so these routers aren't really obsolete, particularly if they have USB ports.

Local projects like https://freifunk.net/en/ existing around the world are great for older devices too. (Or do it yourself with Tor/vpn to give some kind of free internet access or build a community network with mesh).

Consider that plugging in these routers uses energy, let's say they use 15watts total, at $0.15/kWh it's about $20/yr. These ancient devices have few capabilities, so you may wind up running several where you could consolidate them with more modern hardware. Sometimes it really is best to e-waste them.

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In my country you won't get anything working below 20 so it's useless here..

Altought its a nice cause i don't really have room or want to pay the electrical bill for it.. :confused:

Yeah i agree with you sadly so as it seems now after i'm done with my R&D on how to use serial to interact with the devices the e-waste is probably the right place...

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All devices have gpio, in the age of IOT they could become a multiple relays controller to switch on/off lights in you domotic house

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And a good use for an old device is to provide a dedicated slow AP configured as WiFi -b/g for IoT "smart" devices so that your main APs can be set to purely -n or -ac modes for increased speeds. Running -b modes on a main AP can slow things down especially in a busy environment (slow modes take a long time to transmit their data and can hog the radio spectrum) Use a different WiFi channel and SSID for the IoT - be aware that channels overlap somewhat too.

Putting IoT on a dedicated VLAN on a different channel is also good practice - as long as the router has a switch chip this is another good use for old gear.

My older CPE consumes between 1 and 4 Watts so electricity cost is negligible per year as long as it actually performs a useful purpose.

If nothing else, old CPE can provide a useful 4-port switch for benchtop tinkering as long as DHCP is disabled and the router's IP is set to something other than yur main gateway.
I always keep the PSUs, they usually come in to use ometime for something else.

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If they have an USB port they could transform your usb removable hard disk into a nas

And a miniDLNA server

And then they'll start new topics why the nas or dlna speed is slow.

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No new topic about that...:rofl:
old hardware low performances of course.
But those are only ideas about what could be done with those devices, could pop up an interesting idea for someone....

Or a dlna IPTV with Xupnpd...
.... an mpd internet radio/audio file player if with an USB audio device