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Introduction
The F5D6231 is similar to the (F5D6130); it's a small and affordable 802.11b wireless access point with routing/firewall capabilities (referred to as 'access point' henceforth). Unlike previous models housing only one antenna, this one has two antennas attached to the back of its Roswell-gray case. It features a 9v (1.0A) power supply and typically four or eight 10/100Mbit auto-sensing Ethernet ports. This access point is managed using its embedded web server/web configuration pages. Hacks are currently unavailable.
Technical Details
The F5D6231 takes in 9v (1.0A) to power two main chips - An Amtel AT76C502A MAC and a Conexant CX84200-11 Network Processor.
Amtel AT76C502A
This chip is a 11-megabit WLAN Media Access Controller. Here's more information quoted from Chip Catalog:
AT76C502 is a single-chip Media Access Controller (MAC) that provides all processing and functionality needed for the MAC protocol of wireless LANs (focusing on, but not limited to the IEEE 802.11b standard). This PCMCIA product has been Wi-Fi certified, but it is not currently supported because it has been superceded with Atmel's AT76C502A and AT76C504 which has been Wi-Fi Certified by various customers, using Atmel's respective reference design.
Conexant CX84200-11
Network Processor with an embedded RISC CPU (75mhz ARM7TDMI) and integrated ethernet switch (and wireless suppt. hence the -11?). It contains a flash interface (512Kx8, 512Kx16 up to 1Mx16). It also supports up to five physical Ethernet ports and supports HomePlug (Powerline) and HomePNA (Phoneline) through an MII interface (although likely crippled/untested).
Lesser chips
This access point contains three LF-H24T chips which can each handle a pair of ethernet ports (6 total). For more information, refer to the schematics.
Firmware
The firmware is simple and common in nature. As it's format is kept strictly private, it is dubbed 'DLF'.
04 bytes: Compression/file type (0x02 = zlib) 04 bytes: Data size (minus 80-byte header) 04 bytes: Checksum 65 bytes: Signature data (terminate string at 0x00, pad rest with 0xCC) xx bytes: zlib-compressed data
Stas and Kai Gossner created a tool to extract/compress data in this format!
Hacking
Software-based hacks
This router is serving ASP/HTML pages on a VxWorks platform. Software hacks unavailable at the moment.
Hardware-based hacks
Hardware Antenna Hack
Contributed by sir-hoax@efnet(irc):
Removed the two wip-type antennas that were hardwired into the main-board and resolved the low-gain antenna issue with a female n-type console jack for use with a external antenna.
Recently I found myself acquiring quite a few of these type access-point/router belkin equipment. Found myself very interested in firmware based hacks, and honestly came up short, and found this informative site. With still no firmware hacks in developement, I decided there has to be something that I can do to make this device better. So here we have it, my contribution to the belkin F5D6231-4 modification project. Still working on methods for more modifications related to this device, so I will keep you posted.
Author
More coming soon - Rafael
