When we had a new deck built this summer I took down the antenna for the live Aisparser SDK site. My plan is to put it back up on the peak of he roof along with my 1-wire weather station. I had been using a Sharp EL-5500 as a serial to 802.11 adapter, but it only works with 1 serial port. I have a couple Digi WiME modules left over from my wireless 1-wire project, but that would mean I would have to use 2 of them, which seems like a waste.

Luckily enough I just replaced my main router with a WRT54GL running OpenWRT. One of the features of the '54GL is that it runs Linux and it completely open and hackable (Thanks Linksys!). It also has 2 serial ports buried inside of it. One is used for the serial console and the other is unused. It needs a 10 pin header on the '54GL's motherboard and a level converter to take the 3.3v level from the board up to RS232 levels (~13v). The MAX3232 works perfectly for this. It only requires 4 external caps and power.

I whipped up a PCB with Eagle CAD (on OSX) and pcbpool's basic service (no solder mask, just a bare board). I ended up ordering the wrong width MAX3232 part from DigiKey, but was able to still use them by bending the pins vertical.

Now I have a WRT54GL with 2 serial ports, running linux and only about 3M of free ram. Python won't fit into memory. Thus is born a new project -- SerialSocket, which will be a light-weight 'C' program to connect serial ports to sockets (either local or remote) as well as do UDP broadcast. This way I will be able to broadcast data from the AIS receiver to the local LAN and catch it with multiple apps, and will have a bi-directional socket connection to my Link45 1-wire adapter, the 1-wire weather station and the temperature sensors in the garage freezer and fridge.

Current Mood: accomplished