Back in June I obtained a USB 3G Dongle and thought it would be great if the device could be shared by more than 1 PC/Mac device. I dubbed it ‘CloudSpot’
This sort of devices allows a number of benefits & usage scenarios:
- Macs/PCs not requiring drivers (as I have since found out the 3 ZTE dongle drivers do not work with Snow Leopard)
- Project teams onsite at customer locations have a private WiFi, thus avoiding restrictive customer site firewalls
- Games consoles such as PSP and Nintedo DS could use it (e.g. multiplayer action/web browsing on camping trips)
- The dataplan tarrif for the dongle might be better than the dataplan tarrif for a WiFi enabled Mobile Phone
Todo this I thought that it should be possible to present a software WiFi Access point by an embeded system and bridge the WLAN to the 3G dongle.
Initial investigation showed that this has been done before on embedded 486 and PCMCIA, called Stompbox. But I thought what the hell…
I have experience of embedded systems, more recently the Calao USB9263, so I created a emebeded dev env in a Debian 5.0 VM and made progress into getting the software installed on the device.
The hardware setup looks as follows:
Components are:
ARM System on a Chip – A Calao USB9263 device (ARM9, 256Mb flash, 64Mb RAM)
USB Battery Pack – A rechargable module used to suply power to the device
BlueTooth Dongle – A DLink BT device
3G Dongle – THe Hutchinson 3G ZTE USB Dongle.
WiFi Dongle – An Edimax WiFi Dongle
BAterry Powered USB Hub – Gives more ampage to the wireless devices and saves on main device USB batter pack power.
The software development environemnt was based on Debian Lenny (5.0) -avoiding Ubuntu issues
I setup the project structure based on the book Building Embedded Systems
I used crosstools to create the Cross Compiler – avoiding BuildRoot issues
I used Linux kernel 2.6.30 – which contain Calao Device support as part of the mainline
I used emdebian to create the Root filesystem – avoiding Buildroot issues
The drivers for the Dongle’s are either part of the kernel tree or can be downloaded – there are numerous places that document how to get them to work with a Linux system.
I got to the point of having an (em)Debian Lenny with Java (JamVM) running on the device and part way device driver config.
Things left remaining:
- Configure 3g Dongle
- Configure WiFI dongle
- Configure bridging
- Support scripts
- Optionally addition of secondary services, e.g. support of local rsych backups for laptops via additional USB memory key.
Previous projects
During initial development I came across an old, and somewhat physically larger, project called Stompbox
Since I mothballed this projected a couple of decent looking commercial products have been release:
- Thje Hutchinson 3 MiFi
- An credit card sized (can’t remember the maker)
There are also a number of software solutions for a few (smart) phones that turn the phone into an AP.
Perhaps the fact that my CloudSpot could, in theory, support any manufacturers 3G dongle and also provide secondary services: small intranet for local workgroups, backup and could be wired into a LAN; might make it worth continuing. But one things for sure, it needs a decent box so it doesn’t look like a blaster from Starwars.