All ideasMore in Hobbies
Hobbies

An agent reverse engineered his old modem and got modern OpenWRT running on it

A man had an obscure Alcatel modem with undocumented hardware. He soldered on serial pins, plugged it in, and asked an agent to reverse engineer the firmware. DeepSeek v4.1 Flash took about an hour to get a full OpenWRT build and flash pipeline running in an isolated container, the driver changes worked, and the whole job took under half a day and $0.86 in AI cost, work he says would have taken weeks or months.

$0.86one time

How it works

  1. He solders serial pins onto the modem and connects it
  2. The agent studies the firmware, hex dumps and instruction sets to identify the chip and its signing and encoding
  3. It builds a full OpenWRT build and flash pipeline in an isolated container
  4. Drivers are adjusted and OpenWRT runs on the device from a modern kernel

Why it’s worth knowing

Undocumented hardware that would have eaten weeks of evenings was running an open system the same day, for 86 cents of AI.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on news.ycombinator.com. See the original ↗

Upgraded prompt

A ready-to-use prompt for this idea, built from research on what makes AI agents do the job right: who the AI should be, the exact steps, and a check to make sure it was done the way you wanted.

1Who the AI should be
2The prompt, with the steps
3The check when it’s done
Upgraded prompts are coming soon.

Try next

HobbiesThe AI built its own mail app in 23 minutesHobbiesSpark Learned a Writer's Voice From Sent Emails and Saved It as a Reusable SkillHobbiesThe AI fixed the gapless playback on mp3s I ripped 20 years agoHobbiesThe AI searched five years of email and listed my forgotten accounts

Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.