Inside the KR1 (wanted to see what made it tick)

grey

I popped the KR1 open today (after having tested it with a bunch of cards yesterday with good success, still haven't gotten it working with a phone [6600 & i730] yet). Anyway, thought I'd take some pictures and post them to satisfy any other people's curiosity. Looks like the heart of this is a realtek mips SoC (System on Chip) that has an mmu, and if you look at the datasheet, some other nifty features. I didn't pry the shielding off the minipci card to see what wireless chipset is being used, but I dunno you guys can dig up the silkscreen part #'s for yourselves. :)

Of interest to me are what look to be blank serial port headers, I'm wondering if the linux image might support serial console, since nmapping it reveals that only port 80 is open, so doing anything nonstandard with this would mean uploading a wholely different firmware without much to go from to begin with.

Anyway, this isn't much special, more for my own edification & curiosity - but perhaps other readers here share my curiosity and don't have the KR1 yet. Here's the link:

http://grey.unixfu.net/pics/kyocerakr1/

Scott · Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 1:33 am Post subject:

Cool pics grey. Is that your old stompbox in one of the shots?

Via page 21 of the main KR1 thread (http://www.evdoforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=308&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=300):

hxmiller · EVDO User Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 46

What is the internal antenna pigtail attached to?

Michael · Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 10:16 am Post subject:

Thanks for the pictures.

It looks like the Wifi card just uses standard U.FL connectors.

Interesting, that they use diversity antennas (one internal and one external)
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grey

You can probably see it best here:
http://grey.unixfu.net/pics/kyocerakr1/IMG_1176.JPG

See that little silver piece of metal on the bottom right of the PCB? That's what the internal antenna attaches to. If I did a side shot, it's rises up on the right about 1cm. It has a sticky piece of felt and is split down the middle, so looks like it should function as an antenna. I'm not an RF engineer though, so I can't say how well it performs. :)

Scott: not a 'stompbox' I actually ordered the net4521 when first released to build an OpenBSD based access point about three years ago and it's served me well under that and other guises. :) On Thursday I was asked to get one of our construction crews network access in the middle of a cloverleaf in Mountain View and remembered reading about people using soekris's to do evdo stuff. I looked around, saw the stompbox & junxion box and figured I'd give it a shot myself since I owned the hardware. I got the evdo card up & running in OpenBSD w/o any changes (just created a ppp.conf here: http://grey.unixfu.net/evdo/ppp.conf ), but it was SLOOOOOW like 5KB/s slow, whereas a windowsXP ftping the same test file was 105KB/s. So I scratched my head, but can't waste much time troubleshooting that since this needs to be in place next week. I tried out the stompbox CF image and couldn't even get any of 3 evdo cards to establish a session, even with cofniguring broken ppp & pppd configurations (it was still defaulting to myvzw.com instead of vzw3g.com for username generation). I stopped wasting time with that and tried a few other stompbox-like things, metrix (also pebble linux derived) but again, no joy. pfsense looked pretty promising (based off FreeBSD/m0n0wall) and am working with their devs a bit when I have time.

But in the meantime, I thought I would look at 'commercial offerings' called up dlink & kyocera on monday to see when their products were shipping. dlink said q2, kyocera said it just went on sale & could order it, so I did. :) Since the kr1 doesn't have native ipsec support, I went ahead and ordered a junxion which still hasn't arrived, but in the meantime the kr1 arrived and I've got it working good enough for the application I need, but I'm hoping the junxion shows up today or tomorrow so I can get a l2l ipsec tunnel back to our cisco 3020. Once that's done I'll spend some more leisure time with OpenBSD & pfsense developers to help them test evdo support, I think I'm done wasting time with linux, other people have figured it out and if they burn enough cycles monkeying around with it I guess they get it working. :)

The kr1 impresses me a lot though, I think that junxion & similar competitors will undoubtedly lose their niche markets quickly. Dlink I think is probably not selling until q2 to give kyocera a lead and probably was part of a partnership agreement. But my guess is within a few months (if not sooner, or already, I haven't looked much) the DIY crowd will get this type of functionality going within things like OpenWRT and similar projects.

As you can see from the pics the KR1/dlink uses a realtek RTL8651B, which linux is already ported to (and that's what they're using internally), but there hasn't been much support that I've seen from OpenWRT type projects yet, they've mostly been focused on running on ARM derived SoC's so far, but really as long as your cheap SOHO consumer router has a linux you can load, and some form of expansion, evdo support shouldn't be tough, especially now that native USB evdo modems are appearing - no longer _needs_ a cardbus/pcmcia slot (which really is a misnomer anyway because all these cards aren't native cardbus evdo devices, but are actually evdo chips connected via USB to a virtual USB hub internal to the PC Cards - interesting design!).

Sorry, I tend to go on a lot... but this is neat stuff, I never really looked at it until Thursday, and while there's a lot to learn, it all seems pretty straight forward and nifty.

Mackieman · EVDO Junkie Joined: 31 Oct 2005 Posts: 485

I'm currently building a m0n0wall for home use as my SOHO blows. Your thoughts about getting a m0n0wall-esque system to run EVDO have me wondering if I can create a failover system in m0n0wall that will automatically connect via EVDO if the Ethernet connection fails. And interesting premise...

Scott · Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 5:45 pm Post subject: Re: internal antenna

grey · Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2006 1:48 am Post subject: failover...

Mackieman: OpenBSD has the 'trunk' feature to allow for transparent interface failover, I'm sure some other OS's have similar things. Additionally OpenBSD's pf, pfsync & CARP, allow for entire device failure failover (if say you're running two firewalls) if you wanted a _lot_ of redundancy, but that's probably overkill for most people's needs. :)

More on trunk here: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20051223190752

Also, if you're looking at m0n0wall, I'd say pfsense is a bit more interesting personally speaking. It seems like they're using a newer FreeBSD codebase, and they're using pf as well which is probably about as robust as a firewalling system as you're going to find. They could use some other people helping test the evdo driver support they've incorporated as well, I still haven't had a chance this week.

hxmiller · EVDO User Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 46

Couple of questions

1. Why is the external antenna connected to AUX rather than than main?
2. What is the button battery holder for?

Mackieman · EVDO Junkie Joined: 31 Oct 2005 Posts: 485

I'm using m0n0wall because of it's ease for the most part. I am not overly skilled with linux and its various flavors admitedly; it seems that very little skill in that area is required to get m0n0wall up and running.

Scott · Last edited by Scott on Fri Mar 10, 2006 11:07 pm; edited 1 time in total

hxmiller · EVDO User Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 46

Mackieman · EVDO Junkie Joined: 31 Oct 2005 Posts: 485

The battery was there to keep the time on the unit while it is powered off. In testing it was discoved that this feature was not working. Not only that, but the time was never correct because it did not query the NTP server when powered on. So the change was made to have it query the NTP server every time it powers up to get the current time and remove the battery since it was pointless anyway.