I woke up tonight wondering what’s going on…. My face underneath my right eye is very sore like I got whacked with a hammer. My eye lid has a scratch on the edge that is bothersome. Widespread general pain and I am sitting on an enlarged prostate that feels like I have to go #2. I am rather tired more than I am rested and energetic.
Hurricane IAN is making its way across Florida, mom has not seen anything significant. Her power doesn’t seem to have been affected either.
We did our 90 day visit with the doc first thing this morning.
Mom called on the Echo and we talked for a bit.
Many moons ago I needed a wireless travel router that I could use as a bridge across the room between two disparate networks. The tiny TP-Link TL-WR702N was a very capable 802.11B router.
When I was in South America we needed Internet access and the China USB modems from Guatemala carried malware. I had a TL-WR902AC which you could plug one of these USB modems into and it would provide Wireless Internet. More importantly since I was sharing the Internet I could throttle the users so that my allocation was not used up in a single day.
Move forward a couple years when the TL-WR802AC was getting hard to find I bought a GL.iNet 802.11G “Mango”. When we were deployed to Belize I bought 10 of them to enable the entire team to VPN past the hotel network. I also was able to VPN into my home network in Atlanta with ease.
Move forward two more years I needed a dual band router since the 2Ghz band was terribly overcrowded. Meet the GL.iNet “Slate”, it was a little bigger, but had 5Ghz band and external antennas for a farther reach. When I stood up the network in Pahrump i wanted a little cheaper version so meet the GL.iNet “Creta”. Inside it was almost the same as the “Slate”, but without external antennas.
All these routers are very capable on IPV4, but severely lacked IPV6 functionality. The latest router in the family here at the homestead is the GL.iNet Beryl.
And GL.iNet Opal they are much heavier and draws almost twice the power of the “Slate” or “Creta” routers with a USB-C power connector. (I can’t blame them for using a cell phone connector for a travel router, but 3 Amps is a lot of current for a 5V power supply.) The wires are heavy and pretty short, which is not very conducive to being portable. I have the same problem with the Raspberry Pi Model 4…
Combining the experience gained with the snap IDC LED connectors I found last year. Add that to the inexpensive DC-DC inverters that can supply 3Amps into a USB-C connector, I can power this router using upwards of 12V across very long wires. If the voltage drop is an issue, there are inexpensive Wall Warts that can supply 14V to 24V to compensate for the voltage drop.
I have a few networked devices that don’t like being turn off and they really don’t like the power to them fail. I have multiple UPS units that supply power to these devices, but occasionally I need to do maintenance on the UPS. In those cases, I’ve had to turn everything off to change the power source. One solution that I came up with is a 110V relay that switches the power fast enough the device doesn’t notice.
The coil is attached to the redundant wire such that when it is powered the relay switches to it to support the equipment/load. That way the “Normal” connection can be removed from power without losing power to the critical devices.
I should mention that there are some irregularities.
1. The case shown can be opened which can expose dangerous voltages.
2. The design will falter if the alternate power cannot support the load.
(The relay will chatter, switching rapidly between the two sources.)
3. The design is not intended for switching inductive loads under power.
(Especially if the two sources are out of phase with each other.)
Of course someone came out with one that is actually cheaper than making one. LOL
