Recently I purchased a Mikrotik hap-ac router as I am in the process of moving away from the unify access points I currently use in my home network. The main reasons for this is the numerous GPL violations, the introduction of a call home feature without telling users, as well as the lack of deeper control that only comes with open source software. In any case, the end goal is to leverage Openwisp as the wireless access point controller, and OpenWrt powered access points everywhere in the house. One nice thing about using OpenWrt is that my older Unify AC-LR, also supports it, so I can use a similar process to the one I will describe in this article to leverage my older equipment in the case I do not sell it right away.

This article will detail how to install OpenWrt on the Mikrotik hap-ac router, but will save setup of the access points as well as Openwisp to another article.

Recently I have had the pleasure of completing the course Nand to Tetris on Coursea. Firstly, I'd like to highly recommend it to anyone! I never thought it would be possible for me to understand computers all the way down to the hardware level (past assembly that is); Nand to Tetris has shown me otherwise! It has also inspired me to pursue learning a real world hardware description language and attempt to implement the Hack system on an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). In this article I will describe how the process is coming and the what remains to be completed.

For the impatient, the repository is located here and is documented here.