Jet Pack World Speed Record Set

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Video | 2009-05-14, 14:52

If you had any doubt that we were living in the future, we’re no longer at the “let’s try to build a jet pack” stage. Now we’re trying to see how fast they can go. This past weekend, a Go Fast Jet Pack Pilot named Eric Scott set the world speed record for a jetpack: 68mph. He even raced it against a Ford Focus and narrowly beat the Focus. Eric Scott is no stranger to world records when it comes to jet packs. He also holds the world record for height (1,053ft) and distance (1,500ft) with a jetpack.

The Go Fast (I swear, that’s their name!) Jet Pack is surprisingly environmentally friendly. It is not a combustion engine, and actually uses hydrogen peroxide, precious metals, and super-heated steam to give about 800 horse power for 30 seconds. Oh, and it’s loud, clocking in at 130 db.

I want one.

For a less polished video of the jet pack in action, check this out:

1 Comment

Tonium Pacemaker Replaces Turntables for Hobby DJs

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Movies and Music, Video | 2009-05-08, 12:53

As someone who has a problem with both electronic music and technology, the Tonium Pacemaker seems right up my alley. It’s never going to replace a truly talented DJ and luckily the creators recognize that. However, thanks to the lower price of entry ($499 for the 60GB version), it can bring more people into the world of mixing music. I’ll be honest, I’m torn. I don’t know whether to whine about the purity of vinyl, or to go out and buy a Pacemaker. But I do know that if I was to get one it sure would take up a lot less space than the two Technics + a mixer + cabinet of records. My big question though is how well does it deal with jungle/drum and bass tracks?

If you don’t have the patience for the full in-depth review above, check out Engadget’s quick video highlighting some of the features. The official video is absolutely horrible however:

3 Comments

How To Take Apart the Flip Video Ultra

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Geek | 2009-04-13, 12:50

Flip Video Ultra Camera with Macbook Pro

I love the idea of the Flip Video cameras.I bought a Flip Video Ultra last year and it has served me quite well. It’s small enough that it’s easy to carry around for those random moments when you wish you had a video camera. It’s cheap enough to not worry about taking it places where it could get absolutely destroyed. And it has enough space (60minutes) to record quite a bit of video.

However when I was doing some video for the 2009 Valentine’s Day Pillow Fight I noticed that the power switch was not sliding as easily as I remembered and would occasionally stick and cause problems when I needed to quickly turn the camera on and start recording. I figured it was just dirty so I’d open it up and clean it. I didn’t want to just start pulling stuff apart as I’ve broken many a plastic tab with this method. I did a quick search to see if there were any tear-down guides for disassembling the Flip Video camera, but came up short. I did find this video which was helpful, but also difficult to flip back and forth through. So here’s my quick photo guide to dismantling should you want to clean things, modify the LED, microphone, or whatever.

[Show as slideshow]

Unfortunately after all that disassembling and reassembling my power switch was still sticking. A couple loosening turns of the screw closest to the power switch was actually all the solution I needed. It was still interesting to take a look at the guts of my trusty Flip though.

17 Comments

I Spy Eye-Fi for the iPhone

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware | 2009-01-05, 19:02

Say that quickly three times. I love my Eye-Fi card and have since the early days beta-testing it. It makes “downloading” photos easier, parties more fun, and opens up all sorts of new possibilities. I also like my iPhone as well, but I’ve been kind of disappointed with the iPhone apps for instant uploading of photos so far. AirMe tends to crash and loses the photo, Klick adds the wrong location, and sending via email sends a stripped down image. I’m hoping that the new EyeFi app for the iPhone fixes all these issues and becomes my new app of choice for quickly uploading photos to sites like Flickr as well as transferring to my laptop. More info on the new Eye-Fi app being announced at this year’s Macworld is on their site.

via

3 Comments

Time-Lapse Photography with a TI-85 Graphing Calculator

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Hacks and Mods | 2008-10-31, 13:55

I’ve got a soft spot for time-lapse stuff. Most of the time I make my own videos using a webcam because I have things all set up so that it’s easy and quick for me. However, because the webcam is such low quality, I’ve always had a desire to do some higher resolution time-lapse. With my DSLR (a Pentax K100D), I knew that I would be able to take much better quality photos, but the problem was that it didn’t have a handy way for taking a photo at set intervals. Sure, I could have bought an intervalometer, but that costs money and would be another gadget to add to my collection. Then I came across this instructables: Turn a TI Graphing Calculator into an Intervalometer. All you needed was a TI Calculator, the old Calc-to-Calc link cable (which had a 2.5mm plug) and a DSLR that would accept a 2.5mm remtoe trigger shutter. I had all three.

I dug through my old boxes, pulled out my old TI-85 Calculator and dusted it off. By “dusted it off” I mean I cleaned off the battery corrosion that had built up over the years. Some fresh batteries, and a moment of silence for all the games and programs I wrote in high school that had died with the batteries, and I was ready to program my own intervalometer. If you can’t find your old calculator, you can search for a TI calculator on eBay. Make sure it’s one with a link cable (which you can also find cheap on eBay).

It took a few minutes for me to remember how the TI-85 worked, but before long I was writing my first program in probably 10 years. The Instructables suggested the following code for a TI-83 calculator:
: Prompt A : While 1 : For (H,1,A,1) : End : Send(A) : End

This caused a problem, as the TI-85 calculator doesn’t have the integral Send() function needed to send a signal along the link cable. A little bit of research, and I discovered that you needed to use Outpt(“CBLSEND”,A) instead of Send(A) for the TI-85 calculator. Note, for TI-85 owners, you’ll need at least v9.0 or higher ROM for this. You can check your version by hitting [2nd] [MODE] [ALPHA] [S] and then [EXIT]. I also added an extra line that displays “SNAP!” when a photo should be taken to help troubleshoot if things aren’t working. You can get even fancier with this program, but this is the basic version that should work.

I plugged the calculator into the camera with the link cable, and fired up the program. The first few times I tried really low numbers. Entering 100 for A should give you about a second between shots. While I was testing I had it in RAW mode and it just wasn’t capable of shooting that quickly. I finally settled on entering 5000, which gives me about 12 seconds in between shots, resulting in about 5 shots a minute. I also switched from RAW mode to JPG, since I don’t want to deal with converting all those RAW files into JPGs later. I also set everything (focus, aperture, exposure) to manual so that they wouldn’t change in between shots. I also turned of the photo preview so the LCD wasn’t wasting batteries showing the picture it just took. Then I put the camera on a tripod, pointed it out the window and started the program. After some time I finally stopped the program (hold down the ON key to break execution) and downloaded the images to my laptop for compiling in Quicktime and ended up with what you see above! I can’t wait to try this on a nicer day though, as dreary San Francisco fall days aren’t very exciting.

I should note that the newer Pentax K20D actually has a built in intervolameter, but it’s not clear whether this will produce good time-lapse results as there are some limits on it. Anyone played around with it?

Some good links:
Instructables article
All you ever wanted to know about the TI-85 Calculator
TI Calc FAQ (circa 1997)

12 Comments

Toshiba REGZA 32″ 32RV530u LCD HDTV

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware | 2008-10-18, 12:30

I’ve been meaning to make a post about the new tv/monitor I picked up awhile ago. The projector that a friend had given to me as a birthday gift almost 2 years ago decided it was on it’s way out, or at least its bulb was. And since it was a Woot special, the bulb was long since discontinued and going for $2-300 on eBay (if you could find one for sale). I decided it was better to invest in something nice that would be more useful than the projector. I also wanted something super high-def so that I’d be up-to-date for at least a few months.

What was I looking for?
– Something that fits in our apartment – i.e. no 50″ behemoths
– Something affordable – sub $1000 seemed reasonable
– High def – 1080p, I have a Playstation 3 and can play Blu-Ray
– Multiple inputs – Needs at least one of each: composite, component, HDMI, VGA

How did the Toshiba meet these needs?
– The Toshiba Regza 32″ is the smallest 1080p LCD tv out there that I could find.
– The Regza listed for $759.99 from Newegg.com.
– It’s 1080p
– It has 4 HDMI ports, 2 Component, 2 Composite, VGA, and an Antenna/Coax input

Setup:
I currently have the Toshiba REGZA 32″ setup with the following:
Playstation 3 (HDMI)
XBox (running XBMC) (Component)
Dedicated Laptop running a host of software (VGA)
VCR (Composite)
Laserdisc / Super Nintendo (have to unplug one composite connection to switch)
I also have an HDMI->DVI cable that I can use for plugging in the Macbook Pro when I want to use the TV as a monitor.
Sony Receiver and Speakers (refurb) on the Optical Audio out.

Where does it fall short?
Surprisingly for a “budget” LCD HDTV, I have very few complaints. I haven’t taken the time to truly tweak the color settings and everything, but things looked pretty good out of the box. The only significant issue I have had with it was when I hooked up a laptop the image was slightly off center. I was able to correct this by adjusting the screen though. Whether or not this is the fault of the TV or the laptop, is unknown, but I’m betting it’s the laptop. I’ve also had some issues with getting the best resolution for the laptop, but again I’m guessing blame is on the laptop.

I’m very happy with the TV and it’s nice to have a quick and easy way to watch media, play video games, as well as work. The TV doubles as a beautiful monitor for doing web programming and general browsing. I really wish I had a desk big enough to use this as a dedicated monitor (or even get a second for dual 32″ web browsing!). Like all products, it has it’s little annoyances that I won’t bother getting into since they’re trivial. Things like not being able to name your inputs something other than the defaults. All in all I really like it and I’d buy it again in a second. If you’re looking for a TV that will fit in a small apartment, won’t break the bank, and is high quality, this is it. Toshiba has (unfortunately) not paid me for my endorsement though.

In my research on the set, I came across a bunch of links I’ll share with you:
Current price on Amazon:

Calibration Thread: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1029217

Extensive thread filled with discussion: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=998752

Why you shouldn’t spend a fortune on HDMI Cables: http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=ps3&message.id=828972#M828972
Buy em from Mono price instead: http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10240&cs_id=1024004&p_id=3661&seq=1&format=2

10 Comments

DD-WRT, Tomato, or default Linksys firmware?

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Hacks and Mods | 2008-10-15, 15:26

One of my best “sidewalk scores” since I moved to the Bay Area was a Linksys WRT54G router (v4). This brings up the count of WRT54G routers in the apartment to 3, plus the La Fonera wireless bridge to a friend across the street. How are they being used and what are they running?

Previously I had a WRT54GS (v6) running as our main router/wireless AP. It was running the default Linksys firmware and did a decent job. It’s easy to configure, and it just works once things are all setup. I have had to reboot it a couple times (maybe 3-4?) in the past year, but that’s not that big of a deal. The default firmware is simple, usually easy to understand, but lacking in “fun” features. It also seemed to not really pay much attention to my QoS rules as torrent traffic always chokes our network. It was acceptable, but I wasn’t exceedingly happy or excited with the firmware. Plus it hurts your geek cred to run default firmware when it can be hacked, right?

So, something had to be done about this boring firmware. The sidewalk scored WRT54G just got the Tomato firmware (v1.21) installed on it and replaced the WRT54GS as our main router. I first had to hold down the reset button for 30 seconds to reset things to factory defaults to wipe out the previous owner’s username/password. Then I was able to log into the web interface (default Linksys password is “admin”) and it was beyond easy to upgrade the firmware from the default Linksys firmware to Tomato. You literally browse to the download Tomato firmware and click upgrade. A few minutes later I reloaded the web interface (entered the default password of “admin”) and saw Tomato’s minimalistic admin interface. I ran through and matched all the settings to our existing router and then waited for Heather to take a lunch break to swap them out without any problems. I’ll probably re-flash the old router with DD-WRT or Tomato and drop it back in the office to use on the other end of the ethernet cable I ran back there to have a wired network.

Speaking of the office, there’s also a third WRT54G (v.3) router back there. It’s wired up in the rolling media center, which is comprised of an Ikea rolling shelf thing housing an audio reciever, Xbox, Playstation 3, and 32″ LCD HDTV. Because I keep most of my media on a machine in the living room, but want to play it on the TV, I wanted to be able to stream to either the Xbox or PS3. I used a WRT54G router with it enabled as a wireless bridge using DD-WRT. It utilizes its more sensitive antennas to pick up the weak wireless signal from the living room and then share it with other wireless devices as well as the hardwired Xbox, PS3, and laptop. I set it up once over a year ago, and have not had to touch a single setting on it nor had any problems. It was incredibly easy to setup and it has been rock solid.

So, I know everyone wants to know, what’s the best firmware replacement? Well, ultimately it’s up to you and how you’ll use the router. But here are my thoughts:

Default firmware:
If you’re lazy and just have a normal network setup (cabled modem + wireless router + laptop + wired PC, etc.), and don’t care about tweaking things, then the default firmware is problem fine. If you ever run into a problem, you can call up Linksys tech support and they can help you out.

DD-WRT:
DD-WRT served me very well for several years. However it doesn’t get a lot of development these days. One annoying thing is that it continuously reboots the router when you have to make changes, which can get annoying as you wait each time for it to come back up. It was also extra steps to set up traffic logging so I could quench my stats junkie. It’s a great project, and works incredibly well. I have very few complaints and would probably have kept using this.

Tomato:
However, with my first impressions of Tomato, I’ve found a new firmware to love. Tomato’s interface is incredibly nice and clean:

It’s quick and easy to browse around and change settings. Most settings don’t require restarting as it just restarts the necessary services. It’s on par with DD-WRT, but it has one feature that really sold me on it, bandwidth graphs. Tomato has real-time bandwidth stats where you can watch it update (on a 2sec refresh) your current bandwidth usage based on the network interface (wired/wireless/etc). This alone made me want to install Tomato, and everything else I’ve run into has been a plus. One other nice surprise is that you can mount Samba (i.e. Windows Sharing) file shares in Tomato. So I currently have it backing up the bandwidth stats to a shared folder on another server every hour right now. I’m sure this can be used for all sorts of other fun things I have yet to think of too.

So in the end, unless something terrible rears it’s ugly head, Tomato is now on top in my book due to its interface and stats capabilities.

UPDATE: I noticed shortly after switching to the Tomato based router that streaming .avi videos over a Windows file share was uncommonly jumpy. After some research I went into the Administration->Configuration section and selected “Erase all data in NVRAM memory”. This is recommended if you are switching from a different firmware to Tomato, and will set everything back to defaults. After doing that and reconfiguring, video streaming seemed even better than before!

5 Comments

Kensington’s Portable iPhone Battery Recharger

Filed Under Apple, Gadgets & Hardware | 2008-10-06, 15:56

One of the first lessons I learned when starting to use the iPhone 3G was that the battery life was terrible. It was worse than the Sidekick‘s and many times will not even make it through a day depending on the amount of usage. Now I know there’s all sorts of tricks and tips for extending battery life (turn down the brightness, disable 3G and Wireless, etc.) but they all have an impact on this high-end device that I want to use to its fullest. I needed a better solution to help my iPhone get through a busy day.

With the Sidekick 3 I suffered from a short battery life, so I would carry around a spare Sidekick 3 battery in my bag. Since the iPhone 3G doesn’t have a replaceable battery, this wasn’t an option for me. So the next best thing was to get a portable battery charger to charge the iPhone on the go. After seeing a friend with one, I decided to get the Kensington Battery Pack (Model K33396US). They aren’t paying me to say this, but I must say it is awesome. It comes with four parts to it, a battery pack, 2 cables, and AC adaptor. The battery pack itself is smaller and thinner than the iPhone, and incredibly light. It has a button of the same style as the Macbook batteries that you can press to light up 5 LEDs to see how much charge is left. There are two ports on the battery, a mini-USB and a regular USB. The battery charger came with two cables, a typical mini-USB to regular USB, and a USB to iPhone/iPod dock connector. In order to charge it you connect the AC adaptor to the battery with the typical miniUSB cable. Since I normally carry one of these with me at all times and they’re standard, this means it’s even more useful. You can also connect it to a normal laptop/desktop USB port as well to charge it. Once the battery is charged, you can also flip the USB cable around plugging it into the standard USB port on the battery and then the miniUSB end into another device such as a Sidekick LX. In order to charge the iPhone you use the USB to iPhone adaptor. Again, another standard cable that is already in my bag. Big big thanks to Kensington for not using any proprietary connectors/adaptors/etc in this product!

So how well does it charge? Well I can seem to get a full charge for either my iPhone or my Sidekick LX and still have a few LEDs left of power. I haven’t tried a full charge of my iPod yet, but I imagine it would be similar. The best part of this little device is it’s versatility. Because companies are starting to use standard connections, I can charge a multitude of devices: iPhone 3G, Sidekick LX, and my iPod Video. And I also don’t have to choose which device to charge when on a trip as I can just charge the battery pack and distribute the power as needed across devices. I do recommend getting a small little bag to keep everything together so you don’t lose anything while digging around for something in your bag.

I bought it for $57 from Amazon.com, and had to wait a few weeks for it to be in stock. You might have beeter luck finding it for a good price elsewhere, like searching for “Kensington battery pack” on eBay even. Here’s the official Kensington page on the device. I’ve copied and pasted the specs below:
* Rechargeable battery pack for back-up power for mobile devices
* Enjoy up to 55 hours of extra iPod music play time, up to 14 hours of iPod video play time, up to 5 hours of mobile or smartphone talk time
* Power and recharge your mobile or smartphone, iPod®, MP3 player, PDA and other mobile devices anywhere you go
* Flexible recharging of Power Pack via notebook USB port or included wall adapter with USB charging cable
* Included Mini-USB cable to charge devices like MotoRazr™, MotoKRZR™, Rim® Blackberry™
* LED battery gauge tells how much power is left in your Power Pack
* Also works with Kensington USB Power Tip pack with retractable USB cable

Specifications
* Battery Chemistry: Lithium-Ion Polymer
* Certifications: cULus, CE, FCC
* Input: 5VDC (Mini USB) – 1.00A Max — Output: 5VDC (USB) — 1.50A Max.
* Capacity: 1800mAh, (7Wh)

6 Comments

Using the La Fonera Router from Fon as a Wireless Bridge

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Hacks and Mods | 2008-09-26, 18:43

(If you haven’t hacked DD-WRT onto your Fon router yet, you probably want to read this article: Hacking the La Fonera Fon Router with DD-WRT)

So you’ve got a Fon router with one ethernet port and wireless hardware, what do you do with it? Well you could use it for a number of things thanks to the flexibility of DD-WRT, but I’m going to tell you how to use it as a wireless bridge to connect a device with an ethernet port to your wireless network. This is assuming you’ve already flashed DD-WRT v24 RC7 onto your Fon router.

Plug the Fon router into your laptop/desktop using an ethernet cable. (You’ll probably want to disconnect your machine from any wireless or wired connections while working on this to avoid confusion)
On your computer, set your IP address to manual and set it as something like 192.168.1.166. Anything in the 192.168.1 subdomain will work though.
Open a web browser and connect to the Fonera web interface (http://192.168.1.100 Username: root Password: admin)

Under the Wireless tab, set the Wireless Mode to “Client Bridge”.
Set the Wireless Network Name (SSID) to match the SSID of the router you want to bridge.
Set the Wireless Network Mode to match the router too (probably just leave it at Mixed)

Under Wireless->Wireless Security, setup your security settings like WPA, keys, etc. These should match the router you’re bridging
Then you should check under Status->Wireless and you should see that you are connected to the SSID of the access point you specified.
Go to Setup->Basic Setup and under “WAN Connection Type” set Connection Type to Static IP and manually give your Fon an IP that matches the subnet of your network, i.e. 192.168.1.3.
Set the Gateway and Static DNS 1 to your main router’s ip (mine is 192.168.1.1).
Also change the Network Setup to match these settings.
Change the DHCP Type to “DHCP Forwarder” and the DHCP Server to your main router’s IP address. (This is all of course assuming you’re using DHCP on your router.)

Under Setup->Advanced Routing, change Operating Mode to RIP2 Router

Check under Status->Wireless and you should still be connected to your main router.

Reboot the Fon router (under Administration->Management, at the bottom), unplug and replug the ethernet cable, and reconnect to the web interface, this time using http://192.168.1.3 (or whatever IP you set the Fon router to be). Be patient as the Fon may take awhile to reboot.

Test your internet connection and connection to other local machines on your network, making sure you’re using the ethernet connection to the Fon router. If everything went well, you should be all set!

You should now be able to use the tiny Fon router to hook up one device via ethernet. This could be a Playstation 3, or an Xbox/Xbox 360, or maybe a single computer in a different room that you couldn’t run CAT5 cable to. It’s up to you!

Information via

5 Comments

Hacking the La Fonera Fon Router with DD-WRT

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Hacks and Mods | 2008-09-24, 21:47

I live across the street from a friend and we thought it would be handy to be able to connect to each other’s machines in order to transfer files back and forth. Rather than just connect to each other’s networks as needed, we figured it’d be easier just to setup a third “across-the-street” network. This means that we both need endpoints to connect to the other. For me, I chose to use an old Fon “La Fonera” router that I had stuffed away in a box months ago. Unfortunately the firmware that ships with the Fon router doesn’t have support to do anything like this. Luckily there are free, open-source firmwares out there like DD-WRT that are robust enough to meet our needs. The first major step was to actually get DD-WRT on this router. Here’s how I did it and how you can too:

You’re first going to need some tools:
– An ethernet cable and a laptop/desktop to use. I also recommend having a second machine that you can use just for an internet connection in case you run into trouble.
– Telnet and SSH clients (putty on windows, built-in on OS X)
– A TFTP server setup with the latest release of DD-WRT:
— For Windows, you can use Simple TFTP server
— For OS X, you can use the built-in TFTP server with the following commands:

sudo mkdir /private/tftpboot
sudo /sbin/service tftp start

To test your TFTP connection put a file in /private/tftpboot and try the following:

tftp localhost
get filename

If TFTP is working, great, go grab the v24 RC7 version of the linux.bin file for DD-WRT here and drop it into /private/tftpboot since we’ll need this later. Just in case, I’ve mirrored a copy of linux.bin.

Ok great, your initial things are setup and ready. The first real step is to get SSH enabled, and this proved to be the most challenging as I tried to piece together information from various sites on various methods. Luckily it should be easy for you. How to go about this is different depending on the firmware you have on your Fon router. I had 0.7.1 r2 so I couldn’t use the html form injection method and had to use what is called the Kolofonium hack. Basically it means you set the Fon router to use manual network settings and set the DNS server to 88.198.165.155. Then plug the router in and it will attempt to connect to a Fon server to update. The new DNS server you’ve specified is special though, and will redirect this request to a different server, which will provide different firmware that will then have SSH enabled on the device. This should work for most devices. Once this is done, you’ll need to SSH into the device (ssh 192.168.1.1 with username of “root” and password of “admin”) and enable it permanently by executing the following:

mv /etc/init.d/dropbear /etc/init.d/S50dropbear

Great, SSH is now enabled permanently. Next up, flashing the firmware. Connect via SSH to the LaFonera, and execute the following commands:

cd /tmp
wget http://fonera.info/camicia/openwrt-ar531x-2.4-vmlinux-CAMICIA.lzma
mtd -e vmlinux.bin.l7 write openwrt-ar531x-2.4-vmlinux-CAMICIA.lzma vmlinux.bin.l7
reboot

After a few seconds to allow the Fon to reboot, reconnect over SSH and execute the following:

cd /tmp
wget http://fonera.info/camicia/out.hex
mtd -e “RedBoot config” write out.hex “RedBoot config”
reboot

At this point the Fon router will not be able to boot fully, but don’t worry. We’ll be connecting to it via Telnet. You’ll want to manually configure your machine’s network to be on the 192.168.1.* subnet, I used 192.168.1.166 as the IP for my laptop. Then plug the Fon router in via ethernet and connect via telnet on port 9000, aka “telnet 192.168.1.254 9000”. Once you connect, you may have to hit enter, but then you should see a “RedBoot>” prompt.

Now is the time to use that TFTP server you setup earlier. At the RedBoot> prompt on the Fon router, execute the following:

ip_address -l 192.168.1.254/24 -h 192.168.1.166

If you didn’t setup your computer to 192.168.1.166, replace that with whatever IP address you did use.

Now execute the following:

fis init
load-r -b 0x80041000 linux.bin
fis create linux

The last step (fis create linux) may take awhile. Go make a turkey pot pie or something. Mine took about 20 minutes. When that is done, don’t reboot yet, we still need to set a few things for the Fonera to boot correctly. At the RedBoot> prompt, type “fconfig” and hit enter. Then hit enter (or type the following) as you go through the boot script setup:

Run script at boot: true
Boot script:
.. fis load -l vmlinux.bin.l7
.. exec
Enter script, terminate with empty line
>> fis load -l linux
>> exec
>>
Boot script timeout (1000ms resolution): 10
Use BOOTP for network configuration: false
Gateway IP address:
Local IP address: 192.168.1.254
Local IP address mask: 255.255.255.0
Default server IP address:
Console baud rate: 9600
GDB connection port: 9000
Force console for special debug messages: false
Network debug at boot time: false
Update RedBoot non-volatile configuration – continue (y/n)? y
… Erase from 0xa87e0000-0xa87f0000: .
… Program from 0x80ff0000-0x81000000 at 0xa87e0000: .
RedBoot>reset

Great, now your Fon router should be rebooting. Unplug the ethernet and connect to the wireless AP named “dd-wrt” (login is root/admin if it asks). You should be seeing the DD-WRT control panel in your browser and you are now connected to your Fon router running DD-WRT! Congrats!

Next time, I’ll post how to get your Fon router to act as a wireless bridge to extend your wireless coverage to another device that has an ethernet port, like an XBox or Playstation 3.

A lot of this info came from various sources. I have rewritten and reposted it here in the spirit of propagating the information. In my research I came across some sites and files that were necessary (for old methods) that were no longer available. I didn’t want anyone else to run into this problem. The information above is from my own experience and the combination of bits and pieces from the sites below. Note however that some of these sites may have outdated information, but may be useful if you have older firmware or something:

The Kolofonium Hack (information on how the old and new methods of enabling SSH on the Fonera work. Interesting if you want to know what vulnerabilities are being used to hack this router)
DD-WRT Wiki page on hacking the La Fonera
Hacking the La Fonera (the old method of enabling SSH on old versions of the Fon firmware)

3 Comments

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