New year, new product releases. And a challenge.
Meraki has released a new, powerful 802.11n router, the MR58, targetted at businesses (with a price tag to match). It’s an outdoors version, has three 802.11n radios, five antennas. Meraki:
“The MR58 can also be used to create long distance mesh links as far as 20 km with optional antennas.”
The folks over at Open-Mesh also have a new router, the Professional Mini Router OM1P. New features include “a hardware watchdog chip that will restart the router should it lock up due to environmental or power spikes or short outages” and Power over Ethernet. Still only US$59 (the original still available at US$50). Soon they’ll also start offering Ubiquiti and WiliGear routers, pre-flashed with the Open-Mesh software.
Ubiquiti Networks are holding a contest, the UI/Firmware Challenge with US$200.000 prize money (first prize US$160.000!), ending August 17.They have some lofty goals:
“In an effort to enrich and contribute to the open-source community, Ubiquiti Networks is offering $200,000 in cash prizes for developers who provide the most impressive User Interface/Firmware for Ubiquiti’s newly released open-source embedded wireless platform, the RouterStation.”
“The goal of the contest is to design a feature rich routing firmware with a clean, intuitive web interface for configuration and maintenance of Ubiquiti Networks RouterStation hardware platform.”
As far as I can tell, it’s not about Linux hacking, but rather the UI design only. You might need to buy their RouterStation though…