Saturday 17 May 2014

Solar power PI based Broadband-Hamnet node

The title pretty much says it all. The Realtek RT5370 WiFi dongle is at the
end of a 10m powered USB2 cable. Attached to it is a high gain omni
(10dBi, a figure I don't believe). There is about 1v drop up the cable so
I am feeding 8V up to the WiFi dongle via the modified USB2 cable where a 5V
regulator then provides the correct voltage to power both the dongle and the 4 port
USB2 FE1.1s hub chip which is in the end of the 'active' cable. 

This is a bit of fun as I am not expecting to be able to MESH with anyone
other than with my Linksys WRT54GL but .....

3 comments:

  1. I picked-up an RTL8191S dongle (branded IOGear) for $20 USD to go to a Ubuntu linux box I put together from some junk parts. I have a Dell Inspiron PC that (Ubuntu) I use as my main desktop and always get only my wireless emitters, no farther. This 8191 is hot. I plugged it in and I can see much farther, even at ground level indoors. FYI

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  2. Hi Steve, there does seem to be a huge variation in the performance of
    different chipsets. Finding a chipset that is supported by the current
    PI Kernel and does infrastructure mode can be difficult. I tried 3
    different chipsets before I found one that worked OK.

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