Doh!

April 2, 2008 |   |  Comment  |  nerd, Wireless

So, the rolling hotspot went dead just north of Wichita. All due to a dead battery.

It seems the Mogul, when running WiFi and EVDO, draws more power than my 12V charger can provide. I shoulda brought the 110V charger that came with the unit and plugged it into the power strip in the car. Once we got to the hotel, I borrowed one from Jason Lee, and battery levels increased when running WMWifiRouter on the AC adapter. I think the culprit is the cheap 12V adapter I got at Wal-Mart… it was $7, instead of the $40 that Sprint wanted. It was labeled as a BlackBerry charger, so my guess is there’s a current limiting circuit in there designed to keep the BB from incinerating itself, but is insufficient to power a Mogul running at full bore. I checked on JLee’s charger, and it sources 5V/1A, which is a pretty serious amount of juice.

Liveblogging from the road!

April 1, 2008 |   |  Comment  |  nerd, Wireless

As promised, I’m rolling down I-35, chatting on IRC, and having a webcam chat over MSN with my dad (who uses a Linksys EVDO router for his access at home). Matt is hacking code from his laptop. Clif is paying attention to the road. Since we’re gonna be on interstate highway the whole way, we can pretty much count on a solid EVDO connection the whole way.

I’ve got a running ping going to 4.2.2.2 (a public DNS server). It’s interesting to watch the ping times start to get a little long, then we lose a packet, and then the ping times drop back down to the low 100s. I’m guessing those are tower handoffs. The fact that it works at all is nothing short of miraculous.

Recipe For a Road Trip

March 31, 2008 |   |  1 Comment  |  nerd, Wireless

Half the Resurrection IT crew is getting into the LovingWaiterMobile and hitting the road tomorrow for MinistryTECH/Spring RoundTable. Being geeks, we need net on the go. Here’s how:

Take one Sprint Mogul (or equivalent):

Add the following:

Version 3.0 Rev.A/GPS/WiMo 6.1 firmware update
WMWiFiRouter software
Google Maps for Windows Mobile
An external power source (not strictly necessary, but highly recommended if you’re going to do this for more than about 20 minutes)

Stir carefully and set up the ad-hoc connection on your client devices, and connect.

The result:

Beats the pants off this for sheer elegance, while providing the same functionality:

So where does Google Maps come in? Simple – for GPS Navigation. Which it can do while dishing up wi-fi to our laptops. Now we just need something that will upload our position to a live map 🙂