I was just using the camcorder to take video of random things here and there when I didn’t need anything too hi-res. So I thought to myself I have two options either rig a dc jack on it which wouldn’t of been that bad or make something I have been toying with in my head for a while. I don’t know if anyone else have made these or not I am sure I am not the first but I like to call them “plugin batteries”. Basically I got two old flat head screwdrivers I had laying around and rarely used that were about the right circumference and dremeled just the shaft of them off.

So I was left with a nice metal cylinder. I then added a grove in the middle to place and twist a piece of wire and then did the same with another screwdriver but also dremeled a bit off the sides of the top so it would fit in the negative contact of the battery holder. Then some shrink tubing to insulate the bottom of the “plugin battery” from touching the other side of the contact.

The bottom right picture shows how I figured out where to stick the contacts. I then wired a five fold ac adapter to it and plugged it in.

Now it power ups and I am not afraid to use the light function on it. I have a version two idea that would incorporate the leads coming off of the top of the wire along with maybe a little arduino project to test which leads to use without opening up the device. From my experience most are kind of standard like this one or alternate top left to bottom right however there might be some other combinations out there that I am not aware of and the arduino project would be make it a bit easier to find and then perhaps we can have a universal “plugin battery” for most devices. Leave a comment tell me what yah think!

However, the reception still wasn’t all that great and you were still tethered to one corner of his “faraday cage like house of which no radio frequency could go in or out of”. So I came up with the idea of a repeater station and place the repeater and the can somewhere around his house where he could get reception. Now, I have setup cans before and got great results and I have setup repeaters before and also got great results however, I never combined the two and since he had a satellite dish laying around we decided to do an outdoor wifi satellite dish. Our fist attempt wound up in fail because we didn’t have an adapter for the router and tried to make our own…

And yeah… After we saw what it looked like… We scratched that idea… and decided to wait… Oh well…

So two weeks later we decided to go for round two after we got the parts and another linksys router. We went with a linksys WRT54GS and flashed it with DD-WRT and actually managed to find a version 2.0 so we had more ram and could stick the mega version of it on there and could run some better scripts such as AutoAP. Now I come from a computer and electronics background and Mike my brother-in-law comes from a kind of a mechanics background. So setting this thing up used both of our backgrounds and all and all was an awesome project. So the previous week we painted the old satelite dish black to give it that nice “covert” look.

Then we tried to find reception…

None There                        There Either

So none on the roof which would have been nice. So we decided to use a pole in the yard to see if that would work.

Success! Well we though it was turned out… No so much. After we relocated it in the garage the reception went missing like on the back of milk carton. So that then we decided to trouble shoot the can. We brought the router back outside and checked the reading and bam! Reception was back in action then we disconnect the can and… still connected with the same readings which meant the can wasn’t working right. So after some scavenging about… we found an old Guinness can that used to house some pajamas that Mike had got as a gift for Christmas. So it’s tooling time!

Bam new guiness can was in action and worked great!

However, the can wasn’t going to just stay floating there so Mike fashioned an awesome mount for it from a car project he was working on and it turned out to be the perfect angle!

The finished can in all of it’s glory.

Works great! Now when I go over to visit I wont have to wifi tether to my laptop anymore yayyy.

For a more technical write up see my write up of this project here.