A neighbor near our vacatin property gave us permission to use their wifi until I decide to get a contract with Verizon (the only coverage). Their AP is about 500 feet from our vacation home. This is a short chronicle of finding some DD-WRT hardware that will suit the requirement for acting as a repeater.
I started with a TP-Link TL-WR703N. This has low power consumption. On average about 190ma when powered by USB. I spent several weeks getting OpenWRT, then DD-WRT (fail!) to work on it. This device is cute and cheap. I could not get DD-WRT to work on it. I did get OpenWRT to work, but it took a lot of hours and I had to use the serial pins on it. I can’t verify if Repeater Bridge mode works on this. I did not like having to install OpenWrt’s GUI Luci manually. I also found that there is not enough built in flash to install python (less hack options). This device has a lot of promise given it’s USB port and total power consumption of about ~1.1 watts. I eventually destroyed the WR703N when using an inferior grade of automobile USB power adapter.
Next I purchased an Asus RT-N10+ for about $26. This unit is marketed as DD-WRT ready. I can verify that it is. I only had to flash it once to get DD-WRT on it. Getting Repeater Bridge mode to work on it is much harder. The problem I had was that the unit would not join the “host” SSID. Magically it started working when I when I entered the iwconfig command with no options. It has been working great since then. The RT-N10+ comes with a 12V DC 500ma power adapter. The Kill-A-Watt says this unit uses about 3.4 watts on average. At 12V this makes it hard to power with a 12V solar system (actual voltages range from 10.5 to ~14). I cracked the RT-10N+ open (four screws on the bottom) and found that it uses two AP1534 DC-DC converters. It takes 12V and converts it to 1.5V and 3.6V. I found that you can supply this unit with as little as 4.2V for operation (note: power consumption actually doubles. The unit will consume 2.2 to 2.3 watts). The AP1534 specification says that it will take any input voltage from 3.6V to 18V. This should nicely cover the voltage range presented by a typical solar charge controller.
