Monday, December 2, 2013

A quick look at MobileLite Wireless

I happened to bump into this funny device from Kingston on sale. A MobileLite Wireless MLW221. It's called a wireless card reader, but I also saw some other functions that interested me.

When traveling I every once in a while take a few pictures, and it wouldn't hurt to be able to take a look at them without bringing a laptop. USB OTG could be an option, but it just seemed a bit to boring so the wireless card reader was the way to go. And I would be able to copy the files from the USB CF card reader to an SD card, as backup.

But the functionality that interested me the most was the hackabillity of the device. On the Kingston webpage I could see that they provides the source for the OS of the device. An uClinux build, and its all there for me to play with. Of course I would have too find the right toolchain, and I expected there to be some binary parts as well. But that wouldn't stop me from adding some functionality.

The WiFi on the device is supposed to be able to act as a bridge, so that gives me quite a lot of possibilities on what I can do with the device network wise.

So now I some different things I want to accomplish with this:
  1. Build the image and flash it to the device
  2. Route all my wireless traffic trough it when traveling (in hotels where you only get access for one device etc.)
  3. Route all traffic over an tunnel (OpenVPN)
  4. Use an USB ethernet dongle, for hotels that only have wired internet access.
  5. Make the device automatically upload the pictures to an online service when I plug inn an special memory card.
 So now I just start on top of the list, and see how far I will get before I loose interest and start another project.

The next post will have some instructions on how to build the source, and requirements.

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