Chumby One Becomes A 3g Router

[bunnie] has taken a few moments to show us how to turn our Chumby One into a 3g router. As it turns out, there is an easter egg that allows it to communicate with certain models of 3g dongles. There’s no GUI for this trick, so you’ll be doing most of your configuration via SSH. That shouldn’t be a problem for this crowd though. The Chumby One just got a lot more appealing.

19 thoughts on “Chumby One Becomes A 3g Router

  1. Neat, but what is the point. Isn’t it easier to just carry around the 3g dongle itself and plug it directly into your laptop rather than this whole assembly? You can just as easily set your wireless connection on your laptop to share, creating a hotspot.

    Why not just carry around an inexpensive wireless that supports (or is able to be hacked) usb instead of this setup?

  2. @kirov

    I think you’re onto something there. That can be the next featured hack: “Use your 3G dongle on your….LAPTOP???”

    You’re most likely looking for usefulhackaday.com. Around here, they’ll attach a tent and hose to a ceiling fan and call it a vacuum cleaner.

  3. @Bob

    I just spilled hot coffee on myself from laughing so hard. I LOVE the hacks on this site, but in the 6+ months I’ve been following Hackaday, I have yet to say to myself, “I want to try that.”

  4. this is hackaday. not what can we easily plug into our laptop.
    This definatly a hack, even if it seems dumb to some of you.
    and i’ve been following HAD for a year now…and there are tons of things that i would do. i built a rgb lightbulb after seeing one here. but i didnt use a arduino! i used a pic and real c code. lol

  5. Some people like/have a use for this kind of thing, as evidenced by the MiFi from Verizon (and a variety of other 3G-supporting routers). It’s nice to have a zero-maintenance, plug it in and it works setup (which you could get with this via a simple udev script) that supports a bunch of connected computers at once. Some OS’s and WiFi dongles don’t actually support AP mode, so even with internet connection sharing you don’t end up getting the same functionality of this. There’s plenty of ways to do this; some require no expenses, some require a $100+ dedicated device. This requires something you might already have; call it a value add to an already fun and useful/hackable device.

    But I digress. All I know is it was a lot of fun when four people were in my Mini Cooper, road-tripping up the West Coast and xobs (the chumby engineer who did this hack) pulled out his Falconwing (chumby One before it was named such) prototype board and ran some scripts to kick off internet sharing for the three passengers in the car. That was good times! This is just a cleaned up and simplified version of that hack, good to see he’s finally releasing it.

    So yeah, @mike, it works for that pretty well. :P

  6. When I first read this I though that he was turned into a 3D router. I was really looking forward to seeing the video of him scooting around tearing up stuff with a 10-20krpm spindle sticking out of him.

  7. I think I’m going to get a Chumby 1 now.
    It seems pretty cool.

    Nice hack!

    I pity the douche that hangs on a hacking site and tries to tell people to use stuff the way it’s intended.
    Good luck with that. LOL

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