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.
Wireless Hacks1106 Articles
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.
WL-700gE Serial Port Mod
The Asus WL-700gE is an interesting device. It provides NAS, streaming and routing services thanks to linux. In their quest to modify the WL-700gE to a more flexible platform, [Eric] documented adding a serial port to its not so spacious innards. (FYI, Standard serial/RS-232 signals are around 5 volts ok, more like 12. I was thinking of the max 232/n variety) Asus was kind enough to provide through hole mounts and a TTL interface right on the board with console access already turned on.
I hadn’t realized it before, but the Siemens phone USB data cable is a nice cheap source of USB to TTL serial interfaces. Ironically, replacing the cable on the data unit was actually more difficult than adding the port to the router.
Airport Express Repair
[Eduard] was kind enough to pass along this airport express psu repair how-to (Translated version). The old Airport had those pesky capacitor issues. Apparently the power supply in the little buggers can have issues. The solution? Add a pile of voltage regulators and some smoothing caps to get things powered back up. No word on how the new PSU affects sound output.
Wave Bubble Portable RF Jammer
Hack-A-Day friend [Limor] AKA [ladyada] has been promising a portable RF jammer for a while. guess what she sent me for Christmas? The Wave-bubble is a self tuning RF jammer – good for around 20 feet of RF enforced peace. (It outputs .1-.3 watts) With a pair of less efficient antennas, it even fits inside a pack of cigarettes. She’ll never sell these because the FCC would come-a-knockin, but if you’ve got some major skills, you might be able to build one. (I’m going to believe her take on this, I’ve seen her work in person and it’s some damn fine stuff)
Merry Christmas! Get your Design Challenge entries in today!
Wireless Card = ARM Development Platform
[Archantos] sent us this one. The mustumbler project is actually trying to use some external hardware to make a miniature wireless stumbler. [Archantos] points out that it’s could be a cheap way to get your hands on an ARM development platform. He’s right. Just a few connections gets access to the I2C bus, a GPIO expander for I2C runs the LCD and an EEPROM is there for program storage. The software is still being sorted out, but the hardware itself is functional. If they can manage to reverse engineer the Conexant chipset, they should have a very promising platform.
