II2II: your mission should you choose to accept it is to find a microcontroller with ethernet, TCP/IP and a 230kbps (RS-422?) serial port for under $50 and port an Appletalk stack to it.
I know there's a TCP/IP stack for PICs, there's almost certainly one for AVRs, and it's possible you could fake up a Localtalk port by bit banging.
Personally I don't think the Appletalk to ethernet converters are all that hard to find. The Farallon ones are nice, as they can use the full 230kbps.
Regarding serial ports on OpenWRT routers - I was having a look at that page last night and it seems on most of them it involves soldering a connection to the onboard ISP (in system programming) port. In other words, there is a serial port onboard, but it's not exposed to the outside world via the case. It doesn't look difficult, and there are already software packages to make it useful
I know there's a TCP/IP stack for PICs, there's almost certainly one for AVRs, and it's possible you could fake up a Localtalk port by bit banging.
Personally I don't think the Appletalk to ethernet converters are all that hard to find. The Farallon ones are nice, as they can use the full 230kbps.
Regarding serial ports on OpenWRT routers - I was having a look at that page last night and it seems on most of them it involves soldering a connection to the onboard ISP (in system programming) port. In other words, there is a serial port onboard, but it's not exposed to the outside world via the case. It doesn't look difficult, and there are already software packages to make it useful
I used to do just that when I was living with Linux nerds, and my 6100 didn't have an AAUI converter