I got an old Cisco AP and I looked inside!
I got an old Cisco AP and I looked inside!
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:
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/ )
It never ceases to amaze me how prolific PowerPC/PowerISA was (still is?) in the embedded space
Me too! but now it has this weird "retro" feel when you stumble upon something powered by a PowerPC processor
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
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.