[Mike] takes us through the process of adding a removable high gain antenna to the WRTSL54GS in this article. The antenna that comes on this unit from the factory is a bit small and underpowered. After upgrading it using OpenWrt, an open source full featured router software package, he felt it needed a beefier antenna. So, he cracked it open. The new antenna can simply be soldered in place, where the old antenna was.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKCX1CeXIjA]
With some careful programming and probably tedious testing, [Tim] was able to get his CNC router to play [Jonathan Coulton’s] “Still Alive”. He didn’t just tell the motors to spin at the correct speeds directly though. He computed the 3d vectors necessary to produce the notes. The router thinks it is just doing its job. We would love to see those vectors rendered out in 3d space. Imagine having a physical sculpture of “Still Alive” as seen by a CNC machine. This reminds us of the Obsolete Technology Band.
[via Skullydazed’s twitter]
[Anthony] has transformed a simple router board into a fully fledged Debian system. The board is an RB433AH which has a 680Mhz development board with 3 LAN ports and 3 Mini PCI slots intended for routing tasks. At roughly $150, this could be a pretty versatile tool to have around. Possibly more useful than the SheevaPlug.
[Jeff] is continuing to work on his WiFi streaming radio project and is now into part 7. The reason it’s taken so long is because he’s bothering to document every single piece of the system instead of assuming too much of the reader. The core of the system is an Asus WL-520GU wireless router. It is supported by OpenWRT and has a USB port for use with an external audio card. mpd, Music Player Daemon, is used for playback. This latest part features adding an LCD display for the current track. The router board already has points for the serial port, so it’s just a matter of adding an AVR to talk to the LCD. The next step is building a simple user interface and then boxing everything up. You can view a video of the display below.
We’ve been following [glaciawanderer]’s CNC build for quite some time and he’s recently added a few upgrades to make for an even more interesting machine. He’s been trying out new bearing blocks, anti-backlash nuts, and z-axis plates hoping to get some improvements. In the case of the bearing blocks, he went back to the older style because of the added safety and smoother movement. The final addition he made was a dust collection system. It’s just a couple support hoops and duct tape, but it should keep dust out of the threads and rails.
[Albert] read the Cisco PIX Wiki, and discovered that the motherboard of the PIX 506E is the same as the PIX 525, which has a 600Mhz Coppermine Pentium III CPU. So he took his Cisco PIX 506E and upgraded it by swapping out the Celeron 300Mhz, with a Pentium III 600Mhz and populating the second PC100 RAM slot inside. The system only shows 448Mhz instead of 600Mhz, but it does recognize the PIII, and there are no problems. The CPU load has dropped to 0% after the CPU swap, and RAM upgrade.
[GlacialWanderer] has published the first pictures from his CNC machine build. It’s a three axis gantry style machine that he intends to route and engrave wood with. He’s posted a detailed cost breakdown: $1800. He estimates spending 30 hours researching on sites like CNCzone. The build time for the mechanical side was around 50 hours. The electrical system hasn’t been hoooked up yet, so look for that in a future post. It looks like an incredible machine already, so we can’t wait to see what’s next.
