On Tuesday, October 09, 2018 04:01:49 PM Gene Heskett wrote: > On Tuesday 09 October 2018 12:20:25 Brian wrote: > > It's about time some invented a WiFi device which plugs into a USB > > port. > > Not needed, you can buy such a dongle from netgear for at least half a > decade or longer. I was out of ports on the 4 port in the shop, so I > bought one, moved an old router (running dd-wrt) out there and turned > its radio on, and rigged a teeny desk for my lappy so I could ssh into > the machines and write gcode in the comfort of a folding chair, then > exercise it while being able to see the machine move. But I had to turn > the radio off because it was also bridged to the main router, and thence > to the backbone. One of my neighbors got by the simple ssid, and used > 80 gigs of my bandwidth one month so the radio got turned off and I now > have it hardwired when its out there. So now the radios stay off unless > one of my boys brings in a smartphone and needs a connection.
And that reminds me that there are also somewhat similar devices that plug into a USB port and provide (in my case) 4 more USB ports and one RJ-45 Ethernet port. I bought a couple of those on eBay (surely from the far east) for less than $10 each a few years ago. I use them to connect tablets without Ethernet ports to my LAN. I suppose you could then plug the Ethernet into a WiFi adapter, but I've never tried that, and I'd begin to worry that some timing issue or similar might prevent it from working.
