Companies roll their own, I think, because of a combination of Not Invented Here and secret-sauce binary blobs. They work within the script that the chipset/radio maker gives them to follow.
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They don't often offer inexpensive, deliberately-hackable units like the WRT54GL, I think, because of support costs.
And by "support costs," I don't mean that it was expensive to hold users' hands while they installed custom firmware -- that's never been a service that has been provided.
Instead, I mean that there are people who start goofing with this stuff and run out of skill when hacking close-ish to the metal on this kind of hardware. They don't know how to get themselves out of a jam and unbrick their device.
So they find a way to lie their way into getting an RMA and get the device replaced under warranty, and that's expensive for companies to deal with.
It's disappointing that we still have terrible "press 9 buttons at the same time while reciting from the Necronomicon and plugging in and out the device" recovery stories.
Put the firmware and config on a ** uSD card, or set up some sort of UF2 recovery mode. Then no matter how badly you bollix it up, the answer is "plug it into your computer, download the big prominent "factory image", and drag it onto the device.
If done right, you could even do stuff like "clone the SD card so you can deploy identically-configured units for every branch of your chain business."
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They don't often offer inexpensive, deliberately-hackable units like the WRT54GL, I think, because of support costs.
And by "support costs," I don't mean that it was expensive to hold users' hands while they installed custom firmware -- that's never been a service that has been provided.
Instead, I mean that there are people who start goofing with this stuff and run out of skill when hacking close-ish to the metal on this kind of hardware. They don't know how to get themselves out of a jam and unbrick their device.
So they find a way to lie their way into getting an RMA and get the device replaced under warranty, and that's expensive for companies to deal with.
(Those people fucking suck.)