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Wi-Fi Toys
Wi-Fi Toys by Mike Outmesguine offers 15 projects for radio enthusiasts and those, who have never dealt with wireless networking beyond buying an 802.11 access point at local electronics store. Former US AirForce and National Guard engineer, the author is currently running a technology services company.
Assume for a minute that you have had limited experience with wireless technologies, but are young, ambitious, and eager to dive into the deep sea of wireless data. What kind of projects would be fun to play with? What kind of projects would be educational as well as useful? Probably improving the reception via various antenna hacks would be a cool thing to do, and improving access point to increase coverage would be another way to wow the neighbors with your wireless skills. Discovering other people's networks and wardriving is a must for any wireless security beginner. The author dedicates the first three parts of the book (table of contents here) to building antennas, wardriving and hacking access points. Yes, the book requires toying with hardware and occasionally being outside in the fresh air.
The first chapter, Building Your Own Wi-Fi Antenna Cable, is available online in PDF format and it talks about building your own antenna cable. The rest of the chapters in Part 1 take the reader through building a paperclip antenna, creating a tin can antenna, and modifying the existing access point with a high gain antenna.
Probably there are some people that read the last sentence and asked themselves, "So what is a high gain antenna?" Which brings us to the next point - the readability of the book. Outmesguine did a really nice job outlining the projects step by step and supplying all the major steps with the photos. The pictures are black-and-white, and so are the diagrams. Overall the pictures turned out nicely, but I wish the author had the color version on the Web site, since some of the images (like on page 79), displaying computer graphics on dark backgrounds, did not turn out very detailed. Everything essential to the project is there, but still, color photos and screenshots would have made the difference in some cases.
The author does a good job of explaining terminology before launching into the project. Where needed, Mike Outmesguine provides helpful diagrams, that any radio amateur is probably already aware of, but they still make a nice and readable book for the rest of us. Also, the goal of the chapters is not just build the toy and get done with it as soon as possible. For example, in chapter 4 when talking about modifying the existing access point, the author understands that the only reason you want to do that is to increase the WiFi coverage in your house. So a few pages are dedicated to propagation losses, interference and everything radio-related that the reader needs to take into account before strengthening the access point with a high-gain antenna.
Chapter 14 is probably the coolest in the book, as it talks about creating a car-to-car wireless link for the purpose of... videoconferencing involving two Webcams and Microsoft NetMeeting. Naturally, this is not for driver-to-driver communication, but in case you've got two cars on the road trip, the passengers now can use their WiFi-enabled laptops (and by now everyone should have one) to launch a video conference.
Overall the book reads great, even if you're not serious about doing some projects, it's still fun to follow photographs and see what Mike and the contributors have done in terms of wireless projects. Each chapter is presented as a single project, so with the exception of terminology knowledge there's no preceding knowledge that needs to be there, so one could theoretically start with a digital picture frame (Chapter 15) that hangs on the wall, downloading the pictures via the wireless link and playing occasional videos.
Overall, this is an interesting book to read, and if you've been looking for simple and intermediate projects involving radio technologies and WiFi, the Wi-Fi Toys is packed with useful information.
You can purchase Wi-Fi Toys from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
But this book doesn't really look all that interesting. When I think about WiFi toys, I don't want common things that might be practical... I want toys. Something I can play with and has virtually no practical application.
For instance, I read awhile back about some guys using one of those cheap robosapiens and a bluetooth module to make a wireless robot controllable from the PC. There's a toy I wouldn't mind reading a step-by-step about.
Maybe a wifi enabled RC car. Or wifi-ing an old palm pilot that downloads slashdot news whenever it detects a wifi signal. This practical crap makes me sick.
user scrougeable WIFI parts seem few and far between...
Well, you can make a CanTenna (Yagi Semi-Directional High Gain antenna) from a Pringles Can (or other suitable can), some pieces of plastic, some washers, some standard copper wire and a few connectors you can buy at Radio Shack pretty cheap.
Judge for yourself, but I'd say that's reasonably scroungeable.
I think about the cats building robotic devices--slightly more to it than the Pringles Can antenna.