Make Your Own 3G Router

April 29th, 2010

There’s an Easter Egg inside the chumby One (which is now on sale at Costco online for $99, cheaper than chumby.com’s $119 price!) that enables it to work with certain 3G USB modems and function as a 3G router (similar to a MiFi).

Above is a picture of a Verizon USB760 modem plugged into the USB port of a chumby One.

Use of the Easter Egg is documented on the chumby wiki, but it can be quite simple:

1. Plug in your 3G card.
2. Go to the Network Config screen by pressing the top button, going to Settings, then tapping on Network.
3. Select “create a new connection”, press OK, and wait for the scan to time out.
4. Select “Other”
5. Enter 3G as the name of the access point. It must have a capital G for it to work.
6. Wait for the subsequent scan to time out.
7. Select “Manual”.
8. Tap “OK” to select None as the encryption type.
9. Tap “OK” to select Automatic IP allocation.
10. Tap “OK” to confirm settings and connect to the network

To activate local wifi sharing, ssh into the device (or plug in a USB keyboard to activate the drop-down console) and use the command “touch /psp/start_ap” to flag the network setup scripts to configure your chumby One as an access point. Note that AP mode also works with other network sources, such as Ethernet-over-USB.

This works because the chumby One ships with a copy of pppd, hostapd and a set of glue scripts (courtesy of xobs) that allow it first to talk to the 3G network, and second to work as an access point that shares the 3G connection with other wifi devices using its internal wifi card.

Since this is an Easter Egg, it has a few rough edges on it, such as no native UI to do things like configure your AP SSID and encryption mode, and for many GSM networks you’ll need to enter a custom username, password and phone number; but you certainly can ssh in and tweak the scripts to set those things up. Regardless, this is a very handy trick that I’ve used in hotels from Shenzhen to Tokyo to New York to set up a wifi hotspot (complete with Internet radio and chumby apps) on the road — the hack works with quite a few 3G dongles and networks (given a little tweaking).

Posted in chumby, Hacking | 35 Comments »

iFixit: knowledge empowers us to recycle

April 27th, 2010

I thought this was a great video; love what Kyle is doing at iFixit. I had heard about the e-waste farms in Africa but never seen footage of them, until now.

Something to think about.

Posted in Hacking, Ponderings | 17 Comments »

bunnie uses this

April 17th, 2010

usesthis.com recently posted an interview where I discuss what hardware and software tools I currently like to use to get my work done. This is a nice follow-on to a post I did about four years ago titled “The contents of my bag” where I summarized the things I carry around with me all the time. The only thing missing from the usesthis interview compared to my previous review is the bag that I use. Currently, it’s a Timbuk2 bag that’s been discontinued, but has the nice feature that it has both a shoulder strap and backpack-style straps with a muted charcoal-and-gray color scheme that is very versatile: it works for both more formal business meetings in Japan, as well as more mobile, casual situations such as hoofing it around the show floor at CES in Vegas. The bag has held up surprisingly well to abuse, although the left shoulder strap is starting to tear off and the tines on one of the snap-buckles for the main flap has broken, rendering it useless. This means my old Coach laptop bag is still the winner for durability, but unfortunately the single-strap design of the bag makes it tough to use when traveling.

Posted in Ponderings | 14 Comments »

Name that Ware, March 2010

March 29th, 2010

The Ware for March 2010 is shown below. Click on the photos for a much larger version.

Thanks to Google, this ware may be fairly trivial to guess, but in a feeble attempt at heightening the challenge a tad, I cropped the main connector bank on the PCB, blurred out the CPU’s part number (just a little), and will give bonus points for naming the exact model number of the Ware.

…is that epoxy I see around an IC? I wonder why that is there. ;-)

Posted in Hacking | 33 Comments »

Winner, Name That Ware February 2010

March 29th, 2010

The Ware for February 2010 is, to the best that I can tell, a variant of the HTC Touch Dual. Since this was an unknown ware for me, judging the winner is always very hard. Based on the link David Gabler sent (congrats on winning, email me for your prize!), I eventually landed at a page of mobile phone service manuals by Mike Channon, of which there is a link to the Touch Dual repair manual, e.g. the “Nike Series Mother Board Repair Guide” (the page asks not to link directly to any of the PDFs, so I’ll respect that and you’ll have to search for “Touch Dual” yourself).

The board outlines and connectors are at roughly the same places, but there are some significant differences in the position of ICs on the side with the SIM card connector. These different ICs are all related to the RF portion of the design, so quite possibly it’s a situation where the variant of the HTC Touch Dual motherboard shown for this ware simply has a different RF section in it from the one in the service manual. There’s a lot of good reasons for that variance — simply being able to work with different networks in different countries may necessitate a significant change to the RF section.

Addressing some of the comments in the ware discussion thread, the board is indeed using blind/buried vias, so with enough layers essentially the board designer gets the luxury of treating each side of the PCB as if they were two separate layouts. As a byproduct, you get the flexibility to pull off a feat such as swapping out all the components on one side of the PCB without affecting the layout on the other side. If a traditional through-hole board technology were used, this would be a nearly unthinkable option. This is a neat trick to see realized in a volume product, and one I will keep in my pocket for use at a later date.

Posted in Hacking | Comments Closed

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