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Homemade EVDO/WiFi Mobile Access Point

Posted by timothy on Tue Apr 19, 2005 11:38 PM
from the car-companies-should-pay-him-to-oem-these dept.
Wireless Networking Hardware Hacking Hardware
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."
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  • Two, now four wheels (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fembots (753724) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @11:39PM (#12289614) Homepage
    Interesting, from two wheels [slashdot.org] to four wheels.

    JIC, coral links for website [nyud.net] and GoogleMap image [nyud.net]
      • 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 [digikey.com] I used for the robot project to sense tilt changes. Have it integrate changes to guess at current tilt, and rec

  • stop moving! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 19 2005, @11:40PM (#12289623)
    How can I use your access point if you keep driving around?

    • Re:stop moving! (Score:5, Funny)

      by rastakid (648791) on Wednesday April 20 2005, @03:36AM (#12290499) Homepage Journal
      No, no. Continue moving! This is what wardriving really is!

      Now we can hold competitions: one AP driving around, several contestants trying to break into a machine in that car while they have to be in a certain proximity to have a connection to it. Sweet!
    • Speaking of...I wanted to do something similar in my camper trailer for vacations or heading to the races. It would be nice to implement this along with some way to make my linux box auto scan and attach to the best non-encrypted signal. Can you do this on linux? I haven't found a way yet. It would be nice to just keep driving around the camp ground until I get a ping response ;)

  • Expensive (Score:4, Funny)

    by Nadsat (652200) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @11:41PM (#12289628) Homepage
    Cost ranging from $600 to 1400+ That's not including the cost of regular oil changes.

  • Why is it... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 19 2005, @11:47PM (#12289658)
    That we have invented a million different ways to distract ourselves while blasting down the highway, without developing self-driving cars?

    • Re:Why is it... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Christopher Thomas (11717) on Wednesday April 20 2005, @12:32AM (#12289899)
      Why is it... That we have invented a million different ways to distract ourselves while blasting down the highway, without developing self-driving cars?

      Building self-driving cars is a Very Hard Problem. It's being worked on, and great progress has been made, but it's not going to be ready for prime time yet.

      The problem is that it has to work safely even under strange or pathological circumstances. Guaranteeing this is much, much harder than getting a car to drive on an empty road and stop at well-marked intersections.

      On the plus side, as soon as a car autopilot drives better than the average driver, the insurance rate perk for getting one will make the switchover very rapid.

      As for distraction, you'll note from the article that the access point was never used by the person driving the vehicle (and that it's in fact illegal to do so in California). It's a passenger perk (and great for when you get _out_ of the car, with the range it has).
    • Because it's a million times easier to invent new distractions than it is to make a car that drives itself over our horribly irregular (from a machine standpoint) network of roads.

      Even having a car that drives itself on four-lane divided highways is beyond the reach of reasonable current technology. Don't even think about doing it in city traffic!

      Sad, I know, but it's not as though no one's tried.

      p

    • Re:Why is it... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pixel.jonah (182967) on Wednesday April 20 2005, @01:42AM (#12290145)
      I witnessed the first DARPA Grand Challenge [darpa.mil]. Very eye opening to say the least. The first place entry cost over $1 million to build and went less than 8 miles. One of the close runners-up that went almost as far was built by two guys for around $40k.

      Simple things were serious issues like - if you're going slowly and your wheel comes up against a rock and at the current amount of throttle, it can't get over, what do you do - how do you know to just give it a little more gas and drive right over vs. you're up against something a little bigger that you should back up and drive around.

  • Finally!!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by zoloback (785676) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @11:47PM (#12289666)
    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

    • 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.

      You should be going here [starbuckseverywhere.net]. The guy's visited 4535 so far, or about 90% of the corporate Starbucks in the country. And others, abroad. If you haven't got a wireless setup for your travel, yet, you can visit the states beforehand and print/save pictures

  • Seems like a good prototype. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Future Man 3000 (706329) on Tuesday April 19 2005, @11:48PM (#12289672) Homepage
    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.
    • 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.

      I'm not sure how he'd get the cost down much further than it is already. He's using off the shelf parts at commodity prices. Building in quantity-100 might shave off 30% or so, but even fabbing your own integrated board with all widgets on it in quantity-1000 would only get to about half the cur
    • If you want to be able to 'integrate per-vehicle information' and 'get realtime data on the best route to work', you're going to have to be able to track me.

      And that's just not happening.

      But google maps partially does this now, in selected cities.

      • If you want to be able to 'integrate per-vehicle information' and 'get realtime data on the best route to work', you're going to have to be able to track me.

        And that's just not happening.

        If one car in a hundred had a transponder, you'd get a good idea of how traffic was flowing on the major routes in and around a city. One in a thousand might even be enough for this.

        You might actually be able to do this just by looking for cell phone emissions from tracking towers. I'm sure at least that many people use
      • Wave goodbye to your car then... I give the UK 10 years, tops, before they try to put a transponder in every car.

        It'll be for road charging - your road tax depends on how far you drive and where - but of course they'll use it for speeding tickets pretty soon afterwards, and the security services will have a back-door immediately, and then they'll let the police use it.

        Tinfoil hat time for biglig, you think? Did you know that Mayor Ken Livingstone has publicly stated that if he ever canceled the congestion
      • Actually, it could make sense. Start by assuming that all taxes collected are income taxes:

        Assume that the average American starts working at 16 and retires at 55. This leaves 39 years of working. We can round up to 40 years of working years.

        with an average of 40 hours wourked out of every 168 hours in a week, slightly less than 1 in 4 hours is spent working while employed.

        Therefore the average person works for less than ten years of their life, which comes close to the number for how long you said
  • According to the article, the embedded platform used was actually a Soekris net4521. There's no such board as the net2421.

  • It'll crawl! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SeiRyu (774810) on Wednesday April 20 2005, @12:02AM (#12289748)
    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.
    • Umm... evdo is 2.4mbps tops, 300-500k PROMISED. Since I've been using it I've averaged 800k down, 160k up. I've had no problem with ssh, (and vnc as well as terminal services )

    • Re:It'll crawl! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tugrik (158279) <tamundson@gmTEAail.com minus caffeine> on Wednesday April 20 2005, @12:21AM (#12289846)
      For speed testing I used Broadband Reports [dslreports.com]'s site.

      In 1xRTT-land I got 70up/30dn most of the time. About 1/4 of the time I'd get 110up/50dn. At the worst (only a few times, and usually when the evening commute hours put a lot of traffic near where I was parked) I'd get about 50/10. Compared to a 56k modem (about 26/20 on the same tool when I tried it), this isn't bad.

      I've had 4 computers using it at the same time. While it will start to gronk on images with multiple access it's truly not that bad. And no, we're not using any kind of proxy, cache or compressor.

      I've yet to get this system out under EVDO coverage yet, save for the single test that got me 600dn (found one local tower where it was activated. Didn't last. Hrmf). When EVDO hits my area (or I take a trip into an EVDO area) I'll put up better metrics.

      Compared to GPRS (my old wireless link) it's much nicer.
    • Not really. I used a Sprint phone as my primary form of net access for nearly a year. While it does compress images(REALLY high compression at that), you can still pull 140kbits continuously. I used to run Kazaa downloading mp3s all the time and I used DUMeter to track my speeds. Consistent 140kbits, except on the weekends, then it was like 14kbits, especially on Sundays. Average reception where I was at was 2-3bars.
    • Oh how broadband has spoiled you.

      Once upon a time, before I left home, I had dialup internet. Unfortunatly my ISP was some government funded one so equipment upgrades were not really their thing.

      We had a 32Kb/s internet connection. I say we because by brother and I shared this dialup connection over our home network. Now yes it was not speedy but with a good IM to keep you company it was quite useable. Image intensive pages took a little to load but we survived.

      Updateing windows and downloading linux ISO

      • Re:It'll crawl! (Score:5, Funny)

        by eno2001 (527078) on Wednesday April 20 2005, @01:02AM (#12290020) Homepage Journal
        Whine, whine, whine. In my day, we had to go up the hill to the bit well and carry the bits back to the PC with the bit bucket! And we liked it!! You kids today with your broadband, and your big pants, and your Ministry of Sound! ;P
    • I've been using the same Verizon broadband service as is described in the article for about six months now. When connecting to their EVDO network, I get a consistant raw rate of 500Kb/s on downloads and around 100Kb/s up. This is in the suburbs about 15 miles from the center of the coverage area I live near (Baltimore). While I don't have any firm numbers, the network seems even faster when I'm nearer to the center of their area, like when in NYC.

      Note that I saw raw rate here because I'm not using the c
    • I have a UMTS A845, and I get over 200K on Cingular (Former ATTWS), Problem, UMTS is already being phased out for HSPDA for upto 10Mbs (4Mbs real world).

      Lucky HSPDA is just a upgrade to UMTS, you get devices that are backwards compatible, so don't expect more UMTS devices in the USA, all new devices are going to be HSPDA or GPRS.

      http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/4520-3504_16-566493 3- 4.html
    • *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.*

      I'd mod you seriously misinformed, if I had mod points and there were such a mod.

      gprs is barely 56k modem. evdo is not gprs, not even nearly.

      the real problem w
  • How tired I am of starting a project, and having someone beat me to it. (sigh)
    • Funny thing is that I'm exactly the same way. I've done dozens of little projects, sometimes right through completion, and by the time I put up some web page about it I find out it was last month's geek press.

      I know of about 5 others (two in my area) who are making similar devices... so I'm still surprised I was the first one to get pages about such a project on /. .

      How far have you gotten on yours, if you're working on the same kind of project? What else have you made yours do?

  • And don't forget... (Score:5, Funny)

    by misleb (129952) on Wednesday April 20 2005, @12:35AM (#12289912)
    If this car's a rockin'... don't look at my webcam pictures uploaded every five minutes!

    -matthew
  • My setup is a Sony u750p [cnet.com] 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.

  • Why do you need a car? (Score:4, Informative)

    by mi (197448) <mi+slashdot@aldan.algebra.com> on Wednesday April 20 2005, @12:47AM (#12289961) Homepage
    My bluetooth cellphone [verizonwireless.com] and laptop [neuro-tech.net] do this. The phone can "dial" Verizon's network. Not sure, what the bandwidth is supposed to be, but I saw downloads of 20 kilobytes per second.

    The laptop talks to the phone over the built-in bluetooth and can share the connection over the built-in WiFi card.

  • Also check out CLIVE (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tugrik (158279) <tamundson@gmTEAail.com minus caffeine> on Wednesday April 20 2005, @01:36AM (#12290130)
    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 [fbrtech.com]. 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 w

  • This ain't yer bluetooth phone. (Score:5, Funny)

    by DingerX (847589) on Wednesday April 20 2005, @03:18AM (#12290456) Journal
    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.

  • /. effect (Score:4, Funny)

    by jimberini (444533) on Wednesday April 20 2005, @07:29AM (#12291241)
    DON'T CLICK ON THE LINK!!!! we're going to crash his car!

  • Nice! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jozer99 (693146) on Wednesday April 20 2005, @09:40AM (#12292283)
    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.
    • This is what folks like JunXion [junxion.com] 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.
      • Yeah, removing WiFi board and adding directional yagi antenna (I see it now, if yagi antenna isn't redundant enough - you use directional yagi antenna), a 3w 800/1900 booster and point at the nearest tower is much easier... Thank you :-D

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