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Homemade EVDO/WiFi Mobile Access Point
Tamundson writes "Over the last few weeks I've built myself a mobile access point for my car. It's based on a Soekris net2421 embedded Linux box and uses Verizon's 1xRTT/EVDO network as its uplink, resharing it over 802.11b. Wherever my car goes, my Internet link goes! :)
I finally put some webpages together on how I built it. The components are pretty cheap and anybody with basic Linux skills can build their own just as easily. I've also got it interfacing with Google Maps to do live vehicle tracking via gpsd. It also uploads pictures from an on-board webcam every five minutes or so."
Interesting, from two wheels to four wheels.
JIC, coral links for website and GoogleMap image
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
How can I use your access point if you keep driving around?
Cost ranging from $600 to 1400+ That's not including the cost of regular oil changes.
The Custom Mary
That we have invented a million different ways to distract ourselves while blasting down the highway, without developing self-driving cars?
Now I'll be able to find the nearest starbucks no matter where I am.
Beats the method of calling my friends every half an hour when i'm on a trip and trying to describe the surrounding cities/streets/lamp posts in hope for some guidance to a hot cup of coffee.
--Beware of on the road browsing though
The future will take care of itself.. It has in the past
I wonder if this guy is running his webserver in his car; it's really slow.... or it could be that he got slashdotted! sucker
Get the cost down, and this would be an interesting way to integrate per-vehicle information (speed and congestion [via vehicle proximities/GPS]) with map information to get realtime data on the best route to work. Or figure out where the most interesting accidents are happening.
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
I dont get Verizon Broadband in Austin (and I always thought that Austin was one of the most wired ... ahem ..wireless cites ). Anyway the live vehicle tracking is a good idea. If they enforced some vehicle tracking mechanism in every new car sold in overcrowded cities, wont that help the people/authorities detect and circumvent jams (and it will probably be a fraction of the cost of the wasted gas)
At the bottom of the page is a counter. It went up from about 1100 to 1200 in a few seconds. Click refresh and watch it jump!
According to the article, the embedded platform used was actually a Soekris net4521. There's no such board as the net2421.
The service companies like verizon/sprint offer using the 3G network achieves much of it's supposed '70k-100k' down speed from compression it applies on the images. (downgrades the quality of jpg, etc)
The real speed is barely comparable to 56k modem (if the use is light on the provider's network) and this is given you have a perfect signal reception. All this is with a SINGLE computer on the network. Now if this were used amongst 2.. or more computers you'd barely be able to browse the web, much less connect to your favorite Linux box via SSH.
Maybe someone could come up with some sort of sattelite WiFi uplink thingamajig... Somehow, I doubt EVDO has as good coverage as XM's sattelites. Very cool idea though.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
Watch his little dragon at the bottom - hit refresh a few times to guage the effect.
How tired I am of starting a project, and having someone beat me to it. (sigh)
Given that the person who wrote the submission is the person who wrote the project page, I think we can file this in the "accidental typo" category".
or his bank pin number....
I think this would make his vehicle rather easy to steal. Easy to recover too, since he can tell the police where his car was five minutes ago.
"When God kisses Satan and the Incarnations applaud." "Death is dead. Long live Death!"
If you can make a cheaper (larger is fine too and wifi isn't nessissary) version, you can probably sell it in area's currently too far out for dsl/cable (don't say "but there won't be any signal out there)
And that's just not happening.
But google maps partially does this now, in selected cities.
If this car's a rockin'... don't look at my webcam pictures uploaded every five minutes!
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
What I didn't put in the project web pages before it got /.'d: I'm making a case with integrated battery that mounts on the back of my R1150GS motorcycle. If I get the size trimmed a bit it should fit without taking up any of the bike's luggage space. Now to figure out how to make a lean-angle sensor to record that along with the speed/position data... :)
My setup is a Sony u750p and with a bluetooth cf-card and a cellphone.
Since its bluetooth, the cellphone stays in my pocket (unless it rings!) and the computer fits in my jacket pocket when not in use. This way I get broadband not just within range of my car, but anywhere I go.
The laptop talks to the phone over the built-in bluetooth and can share the connection over the built-in WiFi card.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I moved the pictures over to the high-bandwidth site. They should be much better behaved now. :)
Will he need to reboot?
Thanks for all the comments and email so far; I'm glad folks seem to like the project.
:)
While you're there, be sure to check out our other hardware hack from last year, stored on the same server: CLIVE. It's an Iridium Flare Tracker we built out of a Gameboy Advance and a DPSS laser.
I've moved all the images from both projects to the same high-bandwidth server so they shouldn't stall out any more. Being slashdotted is rather fun to watch.
Hey, what a cool project! Gotta love comments like "There's so much support for Linux and BSD on this hardware that it's hard not to build one" :-)
Now if enough people hooked up WLAN routers in their cars you could build a mesh network and Internet access could be provided by any available open static access point(s) so that you dont have to pay big $$$ for the mobile linkup.
We don't have EVDO in my area yet, but I do this all the time with my laptop and a 1xrtt connection. It connects through bluetooth to my v710 and I share the connection using an atheros wifi card.
I was going to switch to an intel wifi card when the driver started improving, but they don't support master mode yet.
Under debian, it's fairly easy using ipmasq. If I "ifup" the wireless adapter when there is already a default route (from the phone or ethernet), the wifi card is set up to take a static address with no default route of its own and fire up a dhcp server before it reruns ipmasq.
I was running it today on the bus. A pal was using it for his network connection but he had to ride a lot farther than I did so he was sad when my stop came up.
I wish I knew how to make the net sharing stealthy like OpenBSD does. Without any stealth, I think if verizon wanted to figure out who was sharing their connection, they could find out.
The original article had a link right to it . . .
The 5220 card runs 200 bucks with a 100 buck discount and the service is 80 a month.
I haven't found a dead spot in Austin yet and I know it is good as far down as San Marcos.
wasn't it simpler to put the Verizon's PCMCIA inside the laptop???
Yeah, sure, you can get a bluetooth-enabled phone and run your laptop through that, but the point isn't simply to produce mobile wireless access. It's more about running a permanent network out of your automobile.
We've had the technology and the ability to do this, but the really cool applications are just too risky, too liability-prone, or too legally questionable to catch the attention of the developers. So while your luxocar has a bluetooth network that catches viruses, and a lot of handy value-added features go by the wayside.
I mean, here's the things that are useful for an in-car network:
A) Porn. Porn drives technology, period. I strongly recommend that the next development in this field be a means to stream internet porn onto a heads-up (hands-free) display, possibly via voice command. Since we're all being open-sourcy about it, there should also be a facility to transmit and add to the global wealth of internet porn.
B) Anti-theft. This is talked about in the article, although I find it difficult to imagine a thief wanting anything as ugly as a Honda Element. Maybe if he riced it up a bit, and camouflaged the solar panel as a big-ass aftermarket wing or something; that and one of those "battery life extender" stickers that says "R-Type" on it
C) Navigation: again, there are already factory-installed and aftermarket solutions for this, but we really could use some improvements that only proper geeks can provide:
1. The author mentions networking radar detectors, as well as other traffic indicators (speed, proximity). That's a good start.
2. Much more interesting would be to network a whole slew of sensors. Radar detectors are good; but why not slap in a cheap scanner that runs through a whole range of frequencies and plots spikes and intensities? With a few sensors around, you could provide real-time plots of a large amount of radio traffic, and even localize quite a few. Heck, many police and fire frequencies are already out there on the internet.
Of course, y'all would need some centralized support for that, and if done wrong, it'd probably be the target of some congressman's ire, and attempts to shut it down.
Then again, if you ran something like a series of IRC channels (one for each region, run through port 80 and otherwise made to look like web traffic), authenticated users and blocklists, that just echoed reports from rmeote users, and maybe queries ("anyone got a picture of the tollbooth?"), you'd have your geek comms paradise, and the guy riding shotgun would have plenty of tasks to perform to isolate and avoid the mundane threats of traffic jams, separate ATIS noise from highway patrols, keep a steady stream of porn going to the driver's HU/HDD, and try to avoid throwing up.
D) Don't forget the need to bridge with existing open WiFi access points. Starbucks offers their networks as a service to the community, after all.
Then again, it's just a car. Speeding is generally something best done away from other cars. VoIP won't work too well with 3G latency. Any nerd project that gets mainstream acceptance loses most of its utility as people figure out ways to nickle and dime the life out of it.
http://tarne.fbrtech.com/~element/gomap.php
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
goes against this. Encrypted root, use TOR, anonymous remailers, and so on. I travel a LOT, and I don't care to have people knowing exactly where I am, where I'm headed, or what I'm thinking. I don't dig the idea of pasting a great big electronic target on my car.
Seriously, considering how modern state-of-the-art cell phones don't work at all in such areas (at least here in the US), I don't think the chances of getting a good data link are very high.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
I don't know what kind of car it is, but if it isn't already a chick magnet, I bet it is now!
I use the verizon EvDO service with my linux laptop. I find the service at least as good as most "wifi hotspots" speed wise. And it doesn't break my ssh sessions all the time, isn't filtered, and has a host of other benfits. I've used my laptop, the pc5220, and an OpenWRT wrt54g to set up "free mobile hotspots" at star parties and such, and had it work "ok" for the 3 or 4 other folks using it. It's a pretty good service. Not sure where you get the barely comparable to a 56K modem from. This is true for 1xRTT service, but at least it's there. The thing about the service that does suck is the latency to the dns servers. While I can type reasonably well in a remote ssh session, the ping times to my dns servers is often in excess of 300ms, which is pretty bogus.
I wonder if Doppler shift affects this at all? I'm too just-woken-up to actually figure out how far the frequency will shift at say 60 MPH, I wonder if it's enough to push it into another channel even?
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
DON'T CLICK ON THE LINK!!!! we're going to crash his car!
What units are you referring to when you quote 70up/30dn? Reading the Verizon site, they say kiloBytes per second(kBps). This indicates that multimegabit speeds are possible. But, your post appears to be saying kilobits per second(kbps) which, like a 56k modem isn't terribly exciting.
Also, your post states higher uplink speeds than downlink speeds. Is this correct? It seems contrary to most broadband connections.
I am glad it can be done. I would never have the time or money to do it. I'm glad to see people using their time and money to good use.
There's a lot of interesting social software that could be built with even partial data, but the cost of the commercial sets is so high that it discourages casual hacking.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
First of all, Tor and Garth, this is the coolest project I've seen in a while -- makes me want to build one myself.
I see that the Verizon card is CDMA. Can you build a StompBox that uses GSM networks? I'm assuming you have to find the right PCMCIA card and just swap out your Verizon card and recompile your kernel. If it could be moved from 1xRTT to GSM, it could be portable to just about any GSM network worldwide! Imagine taking the box around Europe and still have internet access to email home!
Linux at home
He could make some money off of this if he wanted. Silk screen a logo on his car, and set up a paypal based payment system, and he could rent the thing out to functions. Forget the car, put it all in one box, plug it into the wall at your outdoor wedding, and voila, Uncle Mirv can be there by webcam! Either that, or he could be nice, and get rid of the WEP, and drive around giving free (although brief) highspeed internet access to the masses.
Does anybody have more information on how to do this? I'm not interested in a live tracker as much as I am interested in being able to download from my garmin and then overlay on google maps. GPS drive sorta works by using gpsbabel, but the maps that GPS drive downloads have a bad lack of detail.
The next step will be to get it running in the flying car and adding altitude data to a 3D google map.
Like the beaver, it's just Dam one thing after another
Maybe not.
sup
Now I have to deal with idots posting to /. while driving!?!
You wanna try the same thing BUT with Collaborative Wireless Daisy Chaining? OVER DUAL EVDO? let me know... i can let you use one of our new release Dual EVDO HSDPA routers wirelessinternetcoverage.com no all i need is someone to bond the two channels for me at an isp...
if you want to use both... for 4000kbps... then just use a evdo and hsdpa coupled dual 3g router gateway to wifi... http://wirelessinternetcoverage.com and if anyone wants to bond this together at an isp... lemme know.. i'll let you borrow one.
actually, the point is that this evdo hsdpa system MAKES YOU a moving hotspot... no need for a starbucks... frappachinos are obsolete! :o)
theres more about it at http://wirelessinternetcoverage.com
Wow! That is very cool! Looks like you have copied the Junxion Box almost exactly. $200 for the Soekris board and box sure beats $699 for the same box that the boys in Seattle painted green. I like the fact that I can customize the software and the WiFi section on the Soekris unit. I am going to place an order for the Soekris box ASAP and build one or two myself.