Arduino gone wireless: TP-LINK TL-WR703N

I recently bought a wired Ethernet shield to experiment internet connectivity with Arduino: the wireless shield was a bit too expensive. Then I found the TP-LINK TL-WR703N 3G router (link) on ebay (link) at less than 25$.

Removing the chinese-only firmware and flashing on the openwrt alternative (link) one can configure it to bridge the ethernet network (so the Arduino wired ethernet shield) to the wireless connection. But the great news do not end here: one can install new packages on the small 400MHz linux enabled router! So I installed the mjpeg_streamer package and some kmod-video packages and I get a webcam streamer server that can go wireless on an Arduino controlled car!

If you plan to use the router as a webcam streaming server you have to be careful to buy a MJPEG compatible webcam. I connected a PS3 EYE camera that does not support MJPEG: it is YUV only, so the router has to do the transcoding (use the -y command line!). As you may expect, the 400MHZ router is not so powerful, so you may have to reduce the framerate and the frame resolution (respectively -f and -r command line parameters in mjpgstreamer).