RT2501U/RT2571W Wi-Fi driver for ultra-embedded devices

This driver enables the use of the low-cost RT2501U/RT2571W SoftMAC Wi-Fi cards on platforms with very limited resources. It is particularily well-suited for cost-sensitive consumer electronic devices. This driver is currently used in mass production with the Nabaztag/tag devices (aka Nabaztag V2).

Features

• Industry-proven
• Written in C
• High portability
• Low memory footprint
• Low CPU resource usage
• Integrates 802.11-compatible stack
• Supports Client (managed) mode
• Supports Access point mode
• Supports WEP
• Supports WPA-PSK

Typical environment

• 30MHz ARM7-based microcontroller
• 64kb Flash[1]
• 64kb RAM[1]
• USB host controller (DMA-capable or with shared memory)
• Any Wi-Fi card based on the Ralink RT2501U/RT2571W chipset
• USB stack (not included)
• TCP/IP stack (not included) [1] taking a reasonable application into account. The driver itself uses 30kb Flash on ARM7 including an USB stack, a C library and debug features ; and RAM usage can be as low as 16kb, depending on application constraints.