I searched the internet to try and get a definitive answer to this before buying the Flipblade but couldn’t find any confirmation. I took a punt and it paid off. So if you’re wondering about getting a Flipblade for your Xoom, it’s fine. You can charge the Xoom while using the Flipblade either by turning the Xoom to portrait orientation or upside-down (thus having the charge and sync cables running off the top).

Up until yesterday I was using a cobbled together Airport Express based WiFi network that used WDS in an attempt to extend the range. These devices are relatively cheap for their feature set but the one thing they are not good at is range. They have internal antennas and run at rather low signal power (around 100mW). It was impossible to push large transfers through this network as it would collapse, it was ok for web browsing and sshing but copying even a 100MB file over it was torture. After a lot of research I found the range of Ubiquiti WiFi devices, these are carrier grade devices but amazingly with consumer prices.

To dip my toe without spending too much I went for a PicoStation M2. This device runs Linux, has an upgradable external antenna, is powered over ethernet (injector included), is weather proof, can run at up to 1000mW and is under $100 shipped to your door.

I am blown away at the software this little box runs, it’s really outstanding. You do need to be technically minded to configure the device (you can’t just plug it in and expect to connect your WiFi devices and go) but it is insanely configurable and if it doesn’t do something you need you can just download the SDK and mod it.

Before I had the PicoStation installed I was only able to get WiFi in a 20m range around the house, any further than that was spotty coverage and even when you had full signal the throughput was very low – I could never copy files around over WiFi and had to use USB sticks to move files around.  Now I’m able to get WiFi all the way from the back gate to the dam (over 100m with lots of tree’s in the way) and I can even stream movies from a simple samba share. From extreme edges of the network I can now reliably get over 1MB/s (yes big B, bytes). Needless to say I’ve dismantled the Airport Express network.

Saving to: `100m.bin’
100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 1.64M/s   in 64s
2011-04-13 13:01:50 (1.57 MB/s) – `100m.bin’ saved [104857600/104857600]

I’ve only had the device for just on 24 hours but I am stoked with it and have no hesitation recommending this equipment to friends and family. A local distributer is available (at the usual Australian markup) but you can easily find USA based online stores that’ll beat our local price even after factoring in postage but when you consider an Airport Express in the local market is $149 the PicoStation is an amazing bargin.

If we stand outside and the weather is right we can sometimes get 1 or 2 bars of mobile signal, if we’re even more lucky it’ll be enough to make a short call. This puts us at the extreme edge of reception (-110dBm). Using a map of local towers and a Yagi-Uda antenna you can normally improve your reception by around +20dBm which is enough to bump up to 3 or 4 “bars” of signal.

My mum has been stuck on satellite connectivity for a year, locked into a contract with probably the worst ISP on the planet (BorderNET.com.au) paying $39 for a measly 1.2GB of downloads (the last Windows service pack blew that quota in a week). I did some searching and found that VirginMobile offer 8GB for the same money over 3G, so it was time for a technology change.

It’s so easy anyone can do it.

First steps: check where your nearest mobile tower is. For us in Australia this is rather easy, simply use the excellent Mobile Tower / Google Maps mashup experiment. Search for your location and scout around it for a local tower for your provider. You can’t zoom out too far otherwise the towers don’t show up (check your zoom level in Melbourne/Sydney). For us the closest Optus tower (that’s who VirginMobile use as their carrier) was 30kms almost due south. As the Yagi-Uda has about a 20 degree reception arc we could simply point the antenna due south and get a good signal. Orientation is also important for Yagi-Uda towers, GSM signals are sent vertically aligned so ensure the Yagi-Uda is also vertically aligned.

Here’s the equipment I used:

From top to bottom:

• Yagi-Uga antenna tuned for 900Mhz (get one tuned for 850Mhz if you plan to use Telstra)
• 10m of good quality coax cable with FME connectors and a CRC9 convertor (as I am plugging it directly into an USB 3G modem)
• Facia antenna mount
• 2 100mm C clamps (for temporary mounting until a permanent location is decided on)

Here’s the final temporary setup:

This antenna is then patched to the 3G modem of your choice. I went for an unlocked Huawei E1762 USB modem from Ebay combined with a Netcomm T1 3G to Wifi router from Officeworks – what is most important about the 3G modem is that the model has an external antenna connector. By using the Netcomm T1 mum can use the internet even if the power goes out (as the T1 has an internal battery that lasts 5 hours) and when she travels she can simply unplug the antenna and take the two devices with her.

You’ll know when it’s working because you’ll get a nice 3 or 4 bars of signal showing on your routers status page:

As you can see we’ve boosted our normal reception from around -110dBm to a much more respectable -91dBm – a 20dBm gain, and it’s no slouch:

My last netbook lasted 4 years before the hard drive and then the screen gave out in quick succession. It was showing its age and it was time for an upgrade anyway so I didn’t feel bad replacing it but I didn’t want to throw it away. As it turns out I had a little project that I wanted to do and it would be perfect (even with a broken HDD and screen).

We recently had a pool installed and I wanted to plot the water temperature over time, both so I knew when it was warm enough for a dip and to see how well the solar heating worked.

First up the netbook still had working USB , VGA and ethernet ports. This meant I could boot from a memory stick, display via our TV and access the network. I created a bootable Ubuntu USB memory stick and set the netbook up behind the TV:

After doing some research on wireless temperature sensors for pools I found the perfect combination. An Oregon Scientific Water Thermo Sensor (THWR288N) combined with a RFXCOM wireless receiver:

The software required on the netbook to read from the rfxcom receiver is called heyu. As I already have a server on my network I decided that the netbook would simply collect the temperature and send it to the server while on it’s display it would show the current temperature and a history graph. Anyone in the family who wants to see what temperature the pool is just changes the channel to “PC” and they see the following:

My heyu configuration is quite simple at the moment as I only have one device transmitting, but now that I have it working I think I will invest in a few more sensors (wind, rain, air temperature, UV and humidity). Right now when the netbook receives any signal from the RFXCOM it will call a small bash script.

/etc/heyu/x10.conf:

TTY dummy
TTY_AUX /dev/ttyUSB0 RFXCOM
ALIAS Pool  A1  ORE_T2  0x2F
SCRIPT A1 anyfunc anysrc :: /home/ubuntu/bin/heyu_anyrfx
START_ENGINE AUTO

As I want to store the data on the existing server the bash script simply does a remote web call to the server and the server stores the value into an RRD via a small PHP script. I may add an RRD to the netbook as well so as to ensure no data from the thermometer is lost if there is a network outage (e.g. a power outage). One of the really cool advantages of using a broken netbook as a server is you get battery backup with it for free, so this system would continue to collect and store data for up to 6 hours of power outage.

/home/ubuntu/bin/heyu_anyrfx:

#!/bin/bash
TEMP=${X10_A1_oreTemp}
curl -s "http://my.server/poolupdate.php?N=N&T=${TEMP}"

http://my.server/poolupdate.php

header("Content-Type: text/plain");
$cmd = sprintf("rrdtool update /var/rrds/pool.rrd %s:%s", $_GET["N"], $_GET["T"]);
$result = exec($cmd, $resultarr, $returncode);
if ($returncode == 0) {
  print "200 OK";
} else {
  print "500 ERROR";
}

And that’s pretty much it. To make the website AJAXy I also make the current temperature available in JSON form (left as an exercise for the reader) and the website simply does a setInterval() to read it every 40 seconds negating the need to reload the page.

As I am already publishing the temperature via JSON the next step is to write an Android widget that displays the pool temperature, pretty much everyone in the family has an Android phone so this will be quite useful for us, and eventually when we get a Google TV it won’t be difficult to have a pool widget on it.

You can see where I disconnected the antenna (the big dip down to -110db) and when I reconnected it all dried out (big jump to -80db).

Let this be a lesson, keep your FME connectors dry (and well sealed from the elements).