Projects
I love it when geeks are just not content to wait for others to deliver on gadgets they crave.
Sometimes it's just a vision of how to combine several things to make something better. Like Mike Outmesguine who built a portable solar-powered WiFi hotspot:
Its secret ingredient: the Junxion Box. Plug a cellular-network card into the book-size open-source-based device, and voilà —instant Wi-Fi hotspot, with speeds averaging around 700 kilobits per second. To power the box, I wired it to a 1.2-amp-hour battery and dropped both into the Voltaic Systems backpack, which has a built-in solar charger. Now I can surf for as long as three hours without being tethered to anything but a cell signal.
Hattip to Instapundit.
And then there's our friend Micah Glasser's plan to build an all-electric motorcycle on a Suzuki GS500E frame.
My goal is to build a machine that is not just functional but performance oriented yet affordable (for me that means under 4 grand).
Micah promises to keep us informed on his progress.
Comments
EV-DO can be pretty fast on the downlink. When parked near a site, I can download 40 megabytes pretty consistantly in 8 minutes, over 12 means the site is not functional, and have seen the time under 5 minutes occasionally. Driving from site to site while a script handles the download I've gotten as much as 150 meg in an hour despite the stress movement puts on the connection.
Uplink speed is nowhere as fast. A scripted ftp upload of a 2meg test file takes 2-1/2 to 3-1/2 minutes. The technology was specifically designed for handset information service and web surfing, and is explicitly not for real-time applications such as VoIP. THe same limitations would clearly apply to an EV-DO hotspot.
One other thing. It is possible to roam onto an alternate provider during an EV-DO session, as I encountered during one cluster test drive, and ordinary connectivity software probably wouldn't tell you the way the test software did. On a guess, this would be expensive.
(previously posted at Daily Pundit)
Posted by: triticale![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.blog.speculist.com/nav-commenters.gif)
|
November 12, 2005 09:10 AM