DD-WRT: Thank goodness for open source!
February 24, 2010 · by Steve Alvarez
I recently took on a home project of connecting several electronic devices up to the Internet. Unfortunately, none of these devices had built-in wireless connectivity, and my home router was nowhere near these devices. While there are multiple solutions to connecting these devices online (wiring up home, networking over power lines, expensive wireless bridges, etc.), they were all costly, and I wanted to see if I could accomplish this for little to no money.
Searching online brought to my attention something I hadn’t heard of before: DD-WRT. What is this you say? Well, it just happens to be free Linux firmware that can be run on many routers to enable them to act as a wireless bridge. I’ll avoid the whole topic here of “what a bridge is”, but I will say that this nifty piece of freeware allows you to use cheap and/or old routers to connect your wireless devices to an existing wireless network. A little bit of research and $20 later, I had installed DD-WRT onto a cheap router and successfully connected all my devices to my wireless network.
I had never messed around with router reconfiguration before (well, besides the stock firmware), and reading some of the online posts made it seem like it was a bit risky, but ultimately, it was actually pretty easy and straightforward. While I have downloaded some freeware in the past, I’ve never really used it much or even got much benefit from any of those applications. However, that all changed once I dove into the world of DD-WRT. If you’re interested in finding out more about it, or have a similar dilemma at home of trying to connect Internet-ready devices to your wireless network, but you want to do it for little or no cost, take a look at the Wiki page that’s been created for this piece of freeware and see if it might help you too:
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