These web pages are about a project I've been working on. Put briefly, it's a WWAN (Wireless Wide Area Network) router. In more human terms, it's a compact little box that gets data from cellular towers and re-shares it for multiple computers to use.
To use it all you do is plug it in to the cigarette lighter of a car (or a 12v supply when at home). It automatically boots up and links in to Verizon's "Broadband Access" service, turning itself into an access point. Turn on your laptop, join the network and voila -- you're on the net! It's just like using a hotspot (such as they have at Starbucks and airports), but it goes anywhere you car goes.
As long as I've got an always-on internet link in the car, why not make it do other things? As part of this project I've made it do live vehicle tracking via Google Maps, upload pictures from an on-board web cam and other tricks.
Why is it called a "StompBox"? I like to think of any nework I build as my own online "stomping grounds"... and I figured if I made a little box that would let me bring my stomping grounds with me wherever I went, I'd have to call it a Stomp Box. It's also not much bigger than one of those effect-pedals that electric-guitar players use, which are also called stomp boxes. Mostly it's just an amusing project-name. :)
I've always liked the concept of having a mobile access point. Sure, you can always put a radiomodem in a PCMCIA slot or use a celphone over bluetooth but that limits you to having a single machine online. What if you want to bring your friends along with you? Yes, I know you can re-share a dialup connection from one machine to another but that seems somehow inelegant. I don't like the idea of other laptops having to be dependent on mine for their data feed. Still, all these links were rather slow and had terrible coverage. Get out of the city and into real higway driving and you either had terrible speed or no data at all. Satellite, at it's dollars-per-minute cost, wasn't a viable option. I used to have viable mobile data back in the mid-nineties via the Richochet system. I loved their stuff. Alas, they died long before even the dot.coms did.
The other project I always wanted to get around to but never seemed to start was an in-vehicle computer. Vehicle tracking, on-board cameras, navigation... there's a world of options. Each time I started piecing one together something would show up on the market that'd do what I want, so I bought that instead. Thus have I ended up with all manner of things that plug into the 12v sockets of the car, like Garmin nav units and backup-cameras. So that project just kept not-happening.
With the advent of low cost GPRS data plans and the providers' subsequent large-scale rollouts, one can finally get data access just about anywhere in the US at a speed good enough for basic web browsing. Competition now starts up, egging carriers into providing better speeds to lure new customers. EDGE, UTMS and EVDO are finally getting around. With flat-rate plans they're obtainable by the everyday geek.
I finally broke down and bought Verzion BroadbandAccess. It comes in the form of a $50 PCMCIA card (called a 5220) and an $80/mo subscription for unlimited use. While Verizon's site only says it works on a Windows box I'd found plenty of sources on the net that spoke of Macintosh cabaility. This is important because I'm the happy owner of a new 17" powerbook, having recently made "the switch" while getting into unix development work.
The card worked as advertised, no worries. In 1xRTT mode I could get about 100-110kbps, according to the Speed Reports page. It also worked just about everywhere I tried... as long as I had my powerbook outside of the car. The antenna on the little card wasn't so hot. Still, it was nice to be able to find a park bench and be able to get work done. The nice part is that when EVDO finally gets to my area it should jump to 600-800kbps from what I've heard. C'mon, Verizon, hurry it up! :)
Not content with the terrible reception on the unit and unwilling to rig up a contraption of wires and stickytape to the nice shiny powerbook I figured the best way to get around this problem was to made a EVDO/WiFi router. Phil Karn, the KA9Q guy, had put up an excellent HowTo for using the 5220 under linux. For years now I've been hearing about people hacking together their own WiFi routers with old hardware and Linux so figured it couldn't be hard to do the same -- just with EVDO as the backhaul. I went digging for an old laptop to try this on and came up dry. Hrrrm. If I had to buy something for this it was going to be much less fun. I might as well see if there's a pre-made one I could just go buy instead. Off to Google I went.
The news was unfortunate. The devices ran anywhere from a respectable $600 (if you bought your subscription from the router provider) to a ludicrous $1400 and up. On top of that they were closed systems; no real expandability. If I'm going to buy a premade router I'll wait a few years until there's a $80 throwaway Linksys at Fry's or something. The good part, though, is that they were stable and solid, with support for numerous cards (EVDO, UTMS, EDGE, etc.); very plug-and-play.
We bought one of those for the tradeshow folks at my office. It works but it's nothing special. The device is quite obviously a small embedded linux unit with a captive portal much like NoCat Splash, all branded up nice and pretty. They even painted it a nifty neon green. But for how much the device cost (without the radio, even!) it had no usage stats, no true captive portal use, was 802.11b only and WEP only. Give the speed of the backhaul I can understand the 802.11b. But no WPA? No open-access/post-authentication (captive portal or similar) to allow easier group use? C'mon! I'm glad my office bought it and not me. It also didn't address the issue of horrible reception in the 5220 card.
I figured, hey... how hard can this be to do? Sure, I've never touched embedded devices before. Wait, I have... the C.L.I.V.E. project had us using an FPGA board on a GameBoy Advance to make an Iridium flare-tracker. How much harder could this be? Again, back to the Bigger Brain (er, Google) I went.
In no time at all I'd found a local company named Soekris Engineering. They specialize in making low-cost, low-power embedded 486 boards that seem to be the darling of the 'build it yourself' router community. There's so much support for Linux and BSD on this hardware that it's hard not to build one. Since they're local it means quick hardware without nasty shipping charges, too. After an evening of reading up I was sure I could do this. I placed an order for a Net4521 (about $180) and went about digging for software.
