Anyone has a tip on any Adsl modem, Home-Router, USB-Ethernet adapter,
etc..
That has an cpu that is easy to hook up additional bus hardware to..?
Many of the wireless routers are miniature Linux boxes and you could at
least find a lot of information about how to add additional I/O. The
Netgear WRT54G is quite popular, very hackable, and cheap (all of $70 at
Wal*Mart!).
I'm also esp curious on those usb<->ethernet adapters some small as thumb.
Do
they contain any form of cpu+flash that is possible to reprogram .. ?
I don't know any particular, but some speculation here:
It's likely that there is a CPU hidden in there somewhere, but those
adapters are usually complete 'systems on a chip' and unlikely to have very
much spare I/O. It's also not uncommon that the chip vendors purposely
don't document much of anything regarding how to use the CPU; they often
provide a binary file and tell you how to dump it into the chip via USB, but
that's it.
(I looked at an Atmel USB host IC once that was meant to be used with an ARM
processor. While it was clear that the USB IC had a processor inside --
either an AVR or 8031 core -- Atmel just gave you the code that the ARM
loaded into the thing and that was that. They actively refused to provide
more details on its internal architecture/operation.)
I get enough excitement just figuring out how various manufacturers add in
extra features such as icon control to LCDs that are otherwise 99% 'Hitachi
HD44780 compatible.'
---Joel Kolstad