Thursday 6 November 2008

First attempt at a wifi dongle

...was unfortunately only partially successful. I picked up a few cheap link cables and the smallest USB wifi dongle I found in a brief search. The wifi dongles turned out to be based on the Zydas ZD1211 chipset (actually rebranded as Atheros AR5524) which is excellent for two reasons: they have drivers in the mainstream Linux kernel and they can run fine off a 3.3V power source. I went for the cheap after-market link cables (actually retractable ones) as they have easy to solder connectors which have all the pins.

I chopped the ends off one of each and soldered the GND, USB+ and USB- appropriately. For the dongles' power supply I tried the "EXT_POWER" pin on the multiconnector, which is supposed to be for powering accessories. To make Palm OS activate the power pin, tie the serial pins on the multiconnector to ground. In Linux on the Treo 650 you can toggle it with GPIO 37.

The dongle was detected fine by Linux and the driver sucessfully uploaded the firmware. Unfortunately on powering up the radio though the device appears to hang and the driver starts reporting timeouts. My guess was the "EXT_POWER" pin cannot supply enough current. To check this, I used my usual trick of stealing power from a molex connector in my PC. Sure enough, it started working fine and I was able to scan and connect to a network and then SSH in from my PC.

This is unfortunate as I'll probably end up having to add a battery pack of some sort. It's much neater a tidier without one. Oh well, probably a smallish Polymer Lithium-ion battery would be suitable. However, the fact that the device enumerates and can have the firmware uploaded while powered by "EXT_POWER" means it may be suitable for lower power USB devices, like flash drives or mice.

Yes, I have heard of SDIO, but it's more fun this way.

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