Evan’s Techie-Blog talks about the vintage ubiquitous Linksys line of networking products that now languish in corners and thrift shops.
This is the WRT54GS, and like other linksys devices from the time it has this compact, neat little stacking form factor. If you need a modem, same shape. If you need a switch, same shape. They even had VOIP boxes and whatever else in this shape. They’re nice, they stack, and largely they’re hackable. These days though, the hardware is feeling a little old and there’s just not really anything more being made shaped like this.
So what to do with them? Use them as enclosures!
I went through a series of these and found the common elements: hole placement, barrel jacks and buttons, LEDs, everything that you would need to make a seamlessly integrated board that just slides into a spare chassis. If you want to salvage some parts from the scrapped device even better, they’ll fit right in. My design is basic and assumes you use the original 12v power supply and want to regulate it down, but everything else is up to you.
You can read more in the post here and the designs for universal board here.
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