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I got a chance to work on and (mostly) finish the Router Arduino project last night. I didn’t get to add anything extra like cool LEDs or anything but I did get the power to the Arduino and the Serial wired up. I still don’t have it doing anything cool yet but hopefully I can whip something cool up on the flight down there.

First I want to show the serial harness. I do have to say, I was a fan of the solid core wire for this project. It makes it almost like clay in the regard that you can mold and shape it however you want. The Serial Harness talks TTL from the Router to the Arduino. It uses a GND, Tx, and Rx on the router to go to the respective places on the arduino.

Here it is installed.

Here it is not installed.

Next I went ahead and applied a heatsink to the broadcom chip. I haven’t overclocked it yet but that doesn’t mean I won’t. In any case it seems to work quite well. (unless I do the USB mod)

Some people might have been wondering why I designed this with the arduino to sit so far back in the case instead of setting it flush to the back like the router. Well I needed to snag some power from the router and I had an old power cord that didn’t work with a 2.1” jack on it. So I decided to use that to power the arduino. The power to the router is 9v and 0.7a. I was a little worried that the amp draw might be too much for both devices but it seemed to work OK. Since the power cord didn’t work I had to get out a volt meter to test it and find the positive and negative sides. The green wire temporarily tied around was to help me remember which side was positive. I then Had to find a 9v lead and a GND off the board so tap into. I figure the best place was right by the power input and I found a great spot.

Putting it all back together…

And the Grand Finale…

I was pretty busy this weekend and didn’t really have a lot of time to work on this. I did however get the lid drilled and countersunk. I also got the two holes in the back drilled for the antennas. I don’t think this will be as sweet as I thought it would be by the time I have to leave tomorrow. I will probably write some Arduino code on the flight and possibly get something cool to done with it. I still have a few things left to do.

• Wire the Arduino power off of the router power input.
• Make the Serial Harness to go from the router to the Arduino
• Possibly mount some more LEDs
• Mount the LCD
• Write code

Here are the update pics.

Saturday I got a chance to wire up the LCD. As a reference I used a diagram on the Arduino site which looks like this.

I pretty much used the same scheme as the one posted above with a few changes. I changed pins 12 and 11 to 7 and 6. I did this so that all the outputs could be on one pin header. I wanted the ability to turn the backlight on and off so I added one wire to go from bklt+ to pin 8 and the bklt- to a ground.

When I was testing the LCD the first time, I only had a 100k ohm pot vs the 10k ohm pot that recommended. I went out and got a 10k ohm one from Radio Shack which turned out to work very nicely. The rectangular shape made it perfect to glue underneath the female pin headers on the harness. I used solid core wire for this particular project because I had a lot of it and it works well.

The Harness

The harness consists of:

• 16 pin female header
• Various lengths of solid core wire
• 9 male header pins
• shrink tube (1/16)
• 10k Ohm Potentiometer

The Pinout

The pinout for the harness is similar to the picture posted above. Moving from left to right (looking down)

1. GND
2. One side of the Potentiometer to 5v.
3. Wiper on Potentiometer
4. Pin 7 (Arduino)
5. GND (loop back to pin 1)
6. Pin 6 (Arduino)
7. NC
8. NC
9. NC
10. NC
11. Pin 5 (Arduino)
12. Pin 4 (Arduino)
13. Pin 3 (Arduino)
14. Pin 2 (Arduino)
15. Pin 8 (Arduino) BL
16. GND (loop back to pin 1)

Here are some pictures.

I got a chance to get the case mostly finished last friday, thanks to some of the guys at my work. They helped me cut some of the hard cuts with a mill. (some of the small inside cuts) There is one hole in the front cut out for the 2×16 LCD display. One hole cut out for the power to the router board and another for the Ethernet ports. Finally there is a hole cut for the USB cable to plug into the Arduino. I did not cut a hole for the 2.1” power jack. I plan to use some power from the router to power the Arduino. I drilled and countersunk 7 holes on the bottom to mount and hold the two boards to the bottom. I used some copper (brass?) spacers (from pc case) to hold the two boards off the deck.

Defcon is a week away and I’m starting to get some stuff together to take on the trip. The thing I’m most excited about is the arduino project. I will have a page dedicated to the build, process, software, and hardware that I used. Basically it’s and arduino hooked up to a wifi router and and LCD display. The router and arduino will talk serial to give and receive commands. I will have this out for display and to hack on at Defcon, so if you see a weird looking clear router looking thing stop by and say hey.

Here’s a few teaser pics.