Our friend [Markie] keeps insisting on dragging all of his old tech into the new millennium. In his recent article about cramming a non-airport WiFi card in his old iBook he hinted at another wireless project coming up. Well here it is: a wireless eMate. eMates were sold to the education sector as durable computers for classroom use. Markie had to build a serial cable to transfer the necessary software to the machine. With only 3MB of RAM and a 25MHz processor the machine isn’t up for much, but it seems to work fairly well as a terminal.
Old Hardware is Great! It proves that that pice of hardware has withstood the test of time.
Congratulations, this ‘hack’ is a driver. Which has also been around since early 2000.
I own a Newton MessagePad 2100 with a WaveLAN card and Hirochi’s driver, I use it as a wireless terminal for my asterisk server. It’s nice to have it upstairs and look at the console output and figure out if there is a problem without having to login or turn on any computer.
Old news. This site is turning into slashdot.
About being a hack or not, getting it wireless alone hardly is a hack indeed. I’m not claiming that either. But let’s get this straight, you own a Newton and hate the fact that this machine gets a little attention?
About hacking an eMate, I did however also hand-crankcharge this eMate earlier on:
http://geektechnique.org/projectlab/597/making-a-100-laptop-for-75-sort-of
Now, I’m not going to combine that with this wireless eMate, but I’m also not quite finished with it yet… ;-)
Never heard of the emate before this, interesting.
Also i’d like to know if this works with the bronze wavelan card which are cheaper to get.
Well, only the Turbo Bronze is said to be working, not the Bronze.
http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/index.php/WiFi
But, cheaper to get? If you’re out now to buy one such a card, I can hardly imagine a WaveLAN Silver-card like mine is gonna be expensive or much more expensive than a Bronze-card, I mean, this is obsolete stuff by any means (but boy is it fun :-)) I found my card for 17.50 euros ($22,-) on an auctionsite in Holland (In the end I actually paid 15 euros ($19,-) per card, cause I bought 4 of them).
I’m not sure how many different versions of these cards are around, but make sure it’s a 16-bit PCMCIA-card rated for 5 volts.
I guess that they’ve gotten cheaper and I’ve gotten richer so it doesn’t matter too much any more.
it’s the year 3000 already? rock on! *loves the new millennium*
hey fabz, we can get married now then!!