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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
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
Heh, no officer, my I didn't crash, I was slashdotted...
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.
How tired I am of starting a project, and having someone beat me to it. (sigh)
This is what folks like JunXion already do. It's really simple. Just remove the WiFi board, add a (surprisingly cheap) directional yagi antenna, a 3w 800/1900 booster and point at the nearest tower. Boom. House-data over ethernet. The device has two ethernet ports already built in. I use one for wired clients and the other as an alternate uplink if I don't use the EVDO card.
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
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.
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... :)
You could use the dual-axis accelerometer I used for the robot project to sense tilt changes. Have it integrate changes to guess at current tilt, and recalibrate itself by assuming that anything maintained for 30 seconds or more is a tilt of zero. You could combine it with one of the pseudo-gyro sensors made by the same company (Analog Devices), but be warned that they're ball-grid array packages (and it's probably overkill for your purposes).
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.
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.
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.
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!
Yeah, that will help him. All Slashdotters double the effect, NOW!
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
DON'T CLICK ON THE LINK!!!! we're going to crash his car!
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.