Netgear WGT634U Music Player Howto
A while ago I saw a project on www.makezine.com where a guy had converted a Netgear WGT634U wireless router to a music player, and had some brief instructions here: http://devices.natetrue.com/musicap/
I talked about this with Susanne, and to my surprise, her reaction was “cool”, rather than the usual “that’s nice”. Curious, I asked her why she thought it was cool, and she told me that then we could beam some tunes into the bathroom, as we had both discussed before, but I had forgotten about. So, the project was officially on.
The instructions on Nathan’s web site assume a fairly advanced level of knowledge, so I was going to need to do a bit more research than that, and thought that I might as well document it.
So, I found a refurbished WGT634U router from CompUSA, and a USB soundcard on Ebay. The instructions for the router at www.openwrt.org suggest that the upload can be done entirely through the web interface on the router, but again, assume a greater level of knowledge than I have.
The step by step instructions are as follows:
1/ Log into the router admin screen using firefox. Note that you cannot access the router admin screen using wireless, you need to use a network cable to connect to the router to do anything. Attempt to upload the .cfg file on the howto. Find that firefox blocked a popup. Try again using IE. Find that the router no longer answers on the IP address. Damn
2/ Build a serial cable. Everyone except me appears to know how to do this, so the instructions are similarly sketchy. For this I have a separate instruction page. The serial interface appears to be pretty standard & should work on other routers as well.
3/ Nothing yet…
April 5th, 2006 at 4:39 am
Hey Pat, it’s been a while! Still not an engineer, I see, but trying to pretend? PCBs and WiFi music - good effort! Drop me a line sometime.
September 11th, 2006 at 4:51 am
Hi,
I found your site while looking for people who have succeeded in hacking together one of these Netgear routers. I laughed when I saw your site, because when I talked it over with Suzanne (my wife, not yours), I got the usual “that’s nice…” But, I figured it was below the threshold where I actually needed permission in the absence of outright hostility, so I bought one on ebay for $25 and now am trying to figure out how to make it all work. I’d love to hear more about how yours is going.
cheers,
mike
September 12th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
Mike
It is going slowly, this summer has been very busy, hopefully I will get back to over winter & I finish a couple of the other projects around.
Good luck with yours.
Pat
October 18th, 2006 at 5:28 pm
I’m trying to accomplish the same task. I purchased 4 Netgear WGT634Us for the MIT Roofnet project, but later settled on a different hardware platform (Meraki.) Trying to find new uses for these routers, a wireless music player sounded interesting. I don’t have a need for a LCD screen, so I should have an easier time than Nathan (http://devices.natetrue.com/musicap/) did. However, I couldn’t get OpenWRT to compile with all the right modules. Nathan states the following kernel modules: kmod-usb-core, kmod-usb-ohci, kmod-alsa, kmod-soundcore as well as the mpd music player need to be enabled in the OpenWRT build. I was able get svn setup on my workstation and downloaded the OpenWRT source tree. ‘make menuconfig’ and I was able to select the required modules. The trouble is when I went to build the image, I have not been able to successfully build OpenWRT. The latest issue was 404 errors when trying to download packages. I haven’t tried again in the page couple of weeks. If I or anyone manages to compile a firmware image for the WGT634U with the required modules, it would be great to post it for others, perhaps with a short howto.
October 18th, 2006 at 5:30 pm
Forgot to mention….there is some great info on the WGT634U at http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Netgear/WGT634U including how to build a serial cable (pin outs, sample circuits, etc.)