Category: Technology

Wrt54g – Unlock the Secrets!

SD card on a WRT54G

I recently bought a Linksys WRT54G wifi router and I am so darned happy to discover that it can be flashed and modded!
Here are a few of the cooler ones I’ve found:

A Wikipedia entry with links for firmware upgrades and what the different hardware revisions are. The new firmware loads are cool, lets you use RADIUS and loads of other stuff.

This one is sweet, how to add an SD card reader to a WRT54G

This project is for people who would like to add a little storage to their Linksys WRT54G router besides the builtin 4MB flash ram. What we will do is connect an SD card reader to some of the GPIO pins of the CPU found inside the Linksys and with the help of a little driver we can use as a block device from Linux. This means that if you compile your kernel for the Linksys with e.g. support for MSDOS partitions and VFAT you will be able to mount, read, write, partition and so on your normal SD cards. The speed obtainable for reading and writing seems to be about 200 KB/s.

Some more information on the GPIO ports.

And if all that wasn’t enough, you can even make a robot out of it

[inspired by HackerMonkey]

4G Prototypes Burn Up the ‘Net

DoCoMo phone

It’s a good thing that the phone technology from Japan won’t reach the US for some time. I mean, what would people do with all that bandwidth? Just get into trouble no doubt. This should give the lawyers at the RIAA nightmares about all the P2P that will be going on via cell phones.

In experiments, prototype phones were used to view 32 high definition video streams, while travelling in an automobile at 20 kilometres per hour. Officials from NTT DoCoMo say the phones could receive data at 100 megabits per second on the move and at up to a gigabit per second while static. At this rate, an entire DVD could be downloaded within a minute. DoCoMo’s current 3G (third generation) phone network offers download speeds of 384 kilobits per second and upload speeds of 129 kilobits per second.

[via gadgets.fosfor.se ]
4G prototypes reach blistering speeds

Hayabusa – Asteroid Sample and Return Mission

Hayabusa

Now this is the kind of thing that I like to see in the news.

Here is some current information on the mission:
Hayabusa completes journey to asteroid Itokawa by ion engine propulsion

For more background…

…Scientists hope to gain an even better understanding of the physical properties and chemical make-up of the asteroid using Hayabusa’s instruments to locate potential locations for sample retrieval, scheduled to get underway in November.

When landing sites are chosen, the Hayabusa spacecraft can make up to three passes to attempt to capture a total of one gram of surface samples, or about two one-thousandths of a pound.

The approaches will heavily lean on the autonomous navigation system aboard the probe, which must operate correctly with little input from engineers 200 million miles away on Earth and cope with the extremely weak gravity field of Itokawa. A target marker will be released on the surface as the spacecraft closes in.

During each opportunity, a 16-inch funnel will first make contact with the asteroid, followed by the firing of a small metal projectile into the surface at well over 600 feet per second. Rocks and dust kicked up by the impact will be gathered by the funnel and fed into the sample collection capsule to be returned to Earth.

“It breaks the surface and ejecta climbing up through a funnel-like device are collected by a sample catcher,” Jun Kawaguchi explained.

On the first pass, it is planned for Hayabusa to deploy a tiny rover called MINERVA to move across the asteroid for up to two days by leaping from place to place in Itokawa’s near-microgravity environment. The 1.3-pound rover will take stereo images using three cameras, and six thermometers will gather temperature measurements. …


Ambitious mission hopes to return bits of asteroid

The Japanese Space Agency home page (Translated)

DIY GPS

Homemade GPS

This is pure DIY goodness.

This is a short description on how I spent some hours this summer building a simple GPS device. For some time now I have been wondering about the possibility to build such a device from mostly scavenged and old parts, the most important being (of course) a GPS receiver module, and an LCD display. And indeed it was possible. ,)

Loads of great things here, he used a slavaged LCD from a cell phone as a display, a NEMA GPA module from eBay, and even burned his own boards using a UV party light.

[via hackaday ]
Ghetto-GPS