The goal of this blog is to help me with the documentation of progress on my quest to install an alternate firmware on the now discontinued Netgear WGR826V.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

The WGR826V

The WGR826V router was made in 2005 by NETGEAR in partnership with Intoto. It was licensed to AT&T for their CallVantage Service. In other words, the 2 FXS ports can only be used with that service.
The router has been discontinued by NETGEAR and it can now be purchased at a cheaper price in some discount stores. In my case, I purchased one from Big Lots at $29.99. Actually, I purchased 2 of them; I donated one of them to the OpenWRT organization, in hopes of helping them create a suitable image for the router. Sadly, the developer who received the router has not done much with it. So, I decided to do it on my own.

Information about the router:

The FCC ID number is: PY3WGR826V. With this piece of information, I was able to determine many things, such as components of the board:

• CPU: Intel IXP-425 @ 266MHz
• RAM: 32M-Byte supporting up to 533MHz CPU
• Flash: Intel TE28F128 16M-Byte
• Wi-Fi: 11g Ralink RT2500 mini PCI card
• SLIC: Silicon Labs Si3210
• Switch: Kendin KS8995X 5-Port switch
• RS-232 Console
• 7 green/amber LEDs and 2 green LEDs
• One Omni-directional Fixed Antenna
• 12Vdc 1.25A slim universal switching power adapter

Ok, it has 32MB of RAM and 16MB of flash. The CPU is an IXP425 and it has a serial console. This is more than enough for what I want to do with it. I should be able to install a custom image of the firmware with Asterisk and QoS support in order to make use of the FXS ports.

What I have done so far:

The serial port was one of the things that I needed to get to work first. So, I figured out the pin-out of the 5 pins mini-din port in the back of the router. I found that the port has 3.3V and GND, so you can power up the voltage level inverter to connect to a computer.

So, here is the pin-out:

4 comments:

islavv said...

TX, RX, GND is clear
for TX,RX should go pins 2,3 on DB9
console
for GND- pin5
what about VCC - is it pin 1 of console port?
1 is Data Carrier Detect

islavv said...

is it USB to din?
is it PS2 connector?
need a working cable for this connector
to get to console :-)

Unknown said...

Here is the result
Console is not RS232 port
It is TTL port
One need to have RS232 to TTL module with MAXIM 2232 or similar chip
Usually costs around $7
one side is RS232 - other is
VCC, Gnd, Tx, Rx (TTL signals)

Anonymous said...

serial level converters
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=449

or

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8780

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