Here's a crazy idea, and maybe someone has come up with it before. If they have, I'd certainly like to know about it.
A lot of today's commodity wireless routers and access points have fairly powerful embedded CPUs, and there are plenty of alternative firmwares that base on the customizability (sp?) of the Linux OS. Many of these routers spend all their time plugged in and powered on...a great situation for the average distributed computing project.
So...why couldn't a router run a distributed computing program, such as distributed.net or SETI@Home with a low priority client that would yield processor time whenever a router/AP related process needs it? Has anyone ever tried this? Are there any programs out there now?
William