I’m on a 1-wire/home automation kick lately. It looks like he’s giving up on the router platform, but [barebottoms] did some interesting work with a couple of wireless routers (a belkin that he fried, and then onto a wrt54g) to create automated controls for his reef. Think of it as home automation for the fishes. It’s an interesting idea – a hacked wireless router could make a fairly robust and power efficient controller for simple HA applications. His site isn’t really that informative, I found the forum posts more interesting.
Wireless Hacks1047 Articles
I2c For The Fonera
La Fonera’s are getting pretty popular lately. [Lefinnois] hacked his to get i2c working. He used a 75LS05 to adapt the io levels, and some bit banging in the software to pull it off. Now the Fonera can be used for inexpensive remote monitoring via inexpensive i2c devices. Not to mention that this could provide a cheap network interface for various micro-controller projects. (I’m thinking networked thermostat for my new house.)
Fonera SD Card
[Jkx] sent in his fonera SD card experiments. It looks similar to the wrt54g mod – bit banging the interface works, but it’ll be slow. I poked around [Jkx] site and found quite a few goodies. (We’ve noticed his He’s built a nice tube amp, but his push-pull tube amp looks very interesting. Oh, and his simple negative power supply could prove handy,
Fonera Ram Upgrade
[buggs187] thought of this when he saw the dual antenna lafonera mod. [Goldserv] picked up a SODIMM off ebay with the right chips and used a SMD removal kit to swap out the 16MB SMD memory chip. After some software patching, he managed to get the full 32MB recognized.
Dual Antenna Fonera Mod
Sometimes the simple hacks make me happy. [CyberZeroCool] sent in his lightly modded fonera router. He hijacked the antenna and pigtail from one of his bricked fonera’s. One hole and a bit of soldering later: dual antennas. Of course, we’ve no idea if he can even use them both, but if it’s possible, openwrt will save the day. Wireless bits can get expensive, so I’ve grown to like mods that don’t need them.
DIY RF Remote Control
I was plotting one of my future projects and found this diy RF remote control. I was struck by how simple the circuits are thanks to the micro-controller and RF modules. This is an older write up, and I know you can get newer modules from Spark Fun electronics, but when I was younger, RF controls always seemed to be the black magic of diy electronics.
IBook Wireless Retrofit
[squishy] sent in his iBook refit project. Normally a laptop ressurection wouldn’t grab my attention, but the wireless card caught my eye. Because his ebay deal didn’t come with an airport card, he refitted it with a Senao 200mW wireless card. The card just fit – and with some dremel work on the antenna connector, it was plug and play under linux.