Story

After the 1.0 release I bought one of these: http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n, as it looked like the cheapest way to get a working piratebox - under $30 delivered, plus a 32gb thumbdrive I had lying around to use as storage. I've had it running for probably about a month.

So a few observations:

• Setup instructions are very simple and had me up and running in about 20 minutes.
• Zero maintenance required. Once it's set up, it'll chug along until it runs out of storage space.
• The one I chose runs off 5v microusb, so you can hook it up to any 5v source (including those external mobile phone battery packs)
• The web interface is a bit clunky at times, most obviously when it comes to uploading and organising files. Apparently you can get webDAV working on them, but I haven't tried yet.

It's pretty good fun for the price, and since it's all open source you can mod it till your heart's content.