What's your game?

Why does no one ever think of the power?

This story over at Boingboing details a project by some folks at Champaign-Urbana who are trying to create cheap Wi-Fi repeaters to build seamless, repeating Wi-Fi networks using old—think 486-class—hardware.

The problem is power. Many old machines suck an astounding amount of power for the puny performance. In many cases, a 66MHz 486 DX2 or original Pentium 60 will draw three or four times as much juice as a standalone Wi-Fi router, before you factor in the moving parts (hard drive and optical drive) and the Wi-Fi card.

Furthermore, I don’t ever recall seeing a bootable CD implentation that worked on a 486-class motherboard.

What I’d much rather see is a modern, cheap kit design that you could buy a lower power embedded CPU/mobo and then add the necessary hardware to it. All you’d need is a 64MB flash card to store the OS, and some sort of motherboard that supports USB or PCMCIA. Total price would probably be under $200, if you picked smart parts.

I think anywhere you have a wireless network, you want to maximize uptime. Depending on 10 year old hardware isn’t a good way to maximize uptime.