• Dandroid@dandroid.app
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    8 months ago

    I was the lead engineer on an Openwrt router for 2 years at my old job. Their documentation is complete and utter shit, but their design is extremely intuitive. Whenever I said to myself, “hell, let’s just try this and see if it works,” it had an insanely high success rate.

    I didn’t know Lua going into this project, but when I left the company, it made me really wonder why more people don’t use Lua. It’s a really nice language.

    I really enjoyed having my own open source router that I could just drop new features into by adding packages and recompiling. I was sad when I had to send all my dev units back.

    • j4k3@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I’m curious what you’re really referring to with Lua. (casual hobbyist here) Is that the UCI implementation stuff? I tried to use my intermediate Linux desktop user experience with bash in OpenWRT, but geez that is frustrating without all the bash extras I’m accustomed/detailed help/manual pages. That on top of trying to figure out NFTables is still a bit too much for my little brain to compress. I just started messing with UCI commands so I haven’t looked under the hood on that one.

      Any ideal device recommendations for fun chipsets to seek out and play with for embedded stuff in this space?

      • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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        8 months ago

        The web UI backend stuff is all done in Lua. So receiving and processing forms was all Lua. My main feature that I implemented was a REST API that was called from another product that my company sold. So I had to do all the REST API processing and data validation and whatnot in Lua.

        I don’t really have recommendations, because I really only knew our product. If I knew what I get, I probably would have got that instead of the Asus router that I ended up with when I had to return my work materials.

    • tslnox@reddthat.com
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      8 months ago

      I pretty successfuly ran a combo of TP-Link with OpenWRT connected with cable to a cheap dumb Edimax, which in turn was connected through wifi to downstairs Zyxel ADSL router from O2 ISP.

      Essentially the Edimax bridged the internet (there was only one place where the signal was strong enough) from downstairs, sent it to the TP-Link and that one spread wifi on the upstairs floor (so we could use phones/notebook) and my brother’s and mine desktop PCs were connected to it by cable. A bit of an overcomplicating simple problem, but it worked (otherwise we would either have no wifi or would have to buy a different router with 2 separate WiFi chips).

      • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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        8 months ago

        OpenVPN server was my number 1. Being able to VPN back into my home from anywhere in the world was amazing. I can’t really remember any other, since it was more than a few years ago.