Hacker Friendly

Blistering heat. Sand storms. Vast distances. Lack of reliable power. These are just some of the challenges of operating an FM radio station in remote locations like Timbuktu. Where do you get an FM exciter that is up to the task?
Adapted Consulting has just released OpenFM: an open source 150 Watt FM transmitter specifically designed […]

 

This past weekend, I helped to establish a 101 Km (62.7 mile) wireless link from Trieste to Piancavallo, Italy. This was part of my work at the 2007 ICTP school on wireless. The gory details of the shot are up on the wiki, but here is the executive summary:

For the Trieste end of […]

 

Details of last April’s 279 km world record wireless link have been published by Silicon Chip Magazine in Australia.
If you’re not a Silicon Chip subscriber, the original write-up is still available in English and Spanish.
 

 

I’m sitting in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, looking for a wireless network.
Oh noes! Teh Free Public WiFi virus is here!!!11!1!
KPN wants € 6.00 for a half hour. But fortunately they are kind enough to allow DNS and ICMP before authentication.
 

 

I’m at the 4th International Conference on the Book in Boston for the weekend. Marco & I had breakfast early this morning, and CNN was on the tv. Incredibly, they ran a short segment detailing Geekcorps’ project in Mali (one aspect of which was documented in Wireless Networking in the Developing World, of […]

 

Here’s a fun design for a steerable can antenna driven by servos and a PIC microcontroller. The page is a little light on details, but since Adrian is a local, maybe we can get him to bring it to hack night (or even field day…)

 

The external antenna version of the Wi-Spy USB spectrum analyzer may not be out yet, but here’s something to tide you over: EaKiu, the 3d spectrum visualization tool for OS X. It’s OpenGL and eye candy-licious. Zoom in and spin around a realtime analysis of the 2.4 GHz spectrum in your immediate vicinity. […]

 

Marco forwarded me an interesting implementation of Wake-on-WLAN from India.
When the network is unused, power is completely removed from the routing hardware (a Soekris 4521 running Pebble). It is switched on again when wireless transmissions are detected. This allows for substantial power savings, which is critical in remote installations.
We use off-the-shelf 802.15.4-based sensor […]

 

Ermanno Pietrosemoli and Javier Triviño (of EsLaRed) and Carlo Fonda (from the ICTP) have successfully established a whopping 279 km wifi link in Venezuela. They did it using a pair of Linksys WRT54Gs running DD-WRT and some recycled satellite dish antennas (no amplifiers!)
A blurb about the project (in Spanish) is up here, along with […]