need help with wifi project

Hi guys, I'm working on a wifi controlled device project, and have some questions I was hoping you could help
me out with.

basically, I have a device that is acting as a web server, that I need to control/communicate with using an
external wireless device(smartphone/tablet). This UI on the external device has to be as robust and lightweight
as possible, running on all wifi devices without having to download an app or anything like that.


The plan I have right now is to hook up a wireless router to the server, and set up a captive portal that
leads to a webpage hosted locally on the server, that acts as the UI in the external device's web browser.


If that is indeed the best solution, I have questions about the setup:

which hardware should I use? It must be less than $40, preferably less than $30. Range is not an issue, in fact
I'd like to contain the range of the signal to less than a few meters, so I'm probably going to use my own
antenna, also must support openWRT or tomato, I’ve heard bad things about DD-WRT.

Do I need to worry about how much flash/ram the device has? This will not be used to access the internet or
anything major, ONLY to load this one webpage UI from the primary device/server and talk to the primary
device/server.

So far the following two seem like something I'm after:

the ASUS RT-N10+ is $30 on newegg, and the TP-LINK TL-WR740N is $25 on newegg:


Also, which firmware should I use? Right now I'm in between openWRT and tomato. I think both are capable of
what I want to do, so this mostly depends on which supports the hardware I decide on.



Lastly, which captive portal solution should I use? I don't think I need any authentication or authorization,
any device should be allowed to connect. I started out looking at wifidog, but it seems like that's more than I
need for just redirecting all traffic to the local server's page, and I’d like to avoid having to run a RADIUS.
With this in mind I was considering something like nocatsplash.



Any suggestions at all would be greatly appreciated, thanks for your time.

 

Hi,

I understand that you said you don't want to use DD-WRT, but personally I have used it on my WAPs and have never had a problem. It also has a captive portal redirector built in (If I remember correctly)

Thanks and welcome to MajorGeeks!

EDIT: Hardware-wise, for limited clients and range, you could get away with almost anything. Cache/RAM won't be an issue as you aren't connecting 64,000 devices at once (I assume). I can personally recommend something like a Linksys WRT54g.

 

fro an interface maybe http://www.webmin.com/ can help