Electronica

Over the last couple of weekends, I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to get an outside wireless access point set up at the house. Earlier this year Jen bought a BirdBuddy and struggled to get it to connect quickly or reliably; we get great reception and all rooms of the house from one router, but because our house is covered in thick sheets of Eisenhower-era aluminum siding, the effect is that of a Faraday cage: wireless signal doesn’t penetrate the outside of the house easily. I’ve done a couple of experiments with various off the shelf plugin repeaters but none of them are able to extend the signal past the back door, so I decided I was going to have to get serious and buy an outside unit. In order to make this work, I knew I was going to have to employ what is called power over ethernet, where the network signal and power both run on the same wire. This avoids having to run an extension cord outside, installation of an outside electrical box, or other dumb/expensive solutions. Thus…