I got an old Cisco AP and I looked inside! ( lemmy.world )

I got this AP for free, and had some fun trying to configure it, and I decided to look at the inside of this thing. It has a PowerPC processor, pretty cool!

It is a Cisco Aironet 1131AG

More pics:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/ee42e254-e4b5-4155-ad27-c7fcb01b76fd.jpeg

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e6069a8b-25d5-4d43-936f-da532658eba8.jpeg

It's an old AP from around 2007, I managed to get the latest firmware thanks to some guy on the Internet Archive (thank god they exists) ! ( https://archive.org/download/cIOS-firmware-images/ )

eldavi , (edited )

i use to work IT at a place that used those cisco AP's and i always considered getting one for myself to drown out the other AP's in my apartment building because my wifi was always spotty no matter what channel i picked and whatever survey i took; the price tag at the time (around $1k+ at the time) was the only thing preventing me from doing so.

litchralee ,

It never ceases to amaze me how prolific PowerPC/PowerISA was (still is?) in the embedded space

Krafting OP ,
@Krafting@lemmy.world avatar

Me too! but now it has this weird "retro" feel when you stumble upon something powered by a PowerPC processor

litchralee , (edited )

Agreed. When I was fresh out of university, my first job had me debugging embedded firmware for a device which had both a PowerPC processor as well as an ARM coprocessor. I remember many evenings staring at disassembled instructions in objdump, as well as getting good at endian conversions. This PPC processor was in big-endian and the ARM was little-endian, which is typical for those processor families. We did briefly consider synthesizing one of them to match the other's endianness, but this was deemed to be even more confusing haha

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