Weak WiFi - A story about getting better WiFi in my room

Troyanac · November 3, 2015

So i hate WiFi when it does not work or it works but my ping is 300+ ms, so i needed a solution. I have 2 D-Link DWL-2100AP's, but due to D-Links broken firmware IP routing, i just could not get it working like it should. Always network unreachable.

My Network goes like this :

AirLive WL-1500R -----------WiFi--------> DWL-2100AP (Client (WDS)) ----------Cable-------> DWL-2100AP (AP) ---------WiFi---------> Laptopt

But the wired link between the two just did not work. So, i grabbed my soldering iron and soldered 3 wires to my router and poked them in my Arduino. Inserted a 1k resistor to keep the ATMega off and started to do witchery with the serial console, just some reverse engineering and stuff. After 2 long hours i finnaly managed to get RedBoot running via a TFTP Server on my other laptop. After that i formated the router flash memory and made a roofs and linux image on it, and flashed OpenWRT Atheros with the TFTP Server and Serial console. And, voila! Linux on my router!

After some Linux routing magic, my WiFi finnaly works in my room!

First boot after image flash

OpenWRT with Linux 2.6.30.10