Not the one I was expecting

I'm setting up a lab in the basement, finished building a lab bench yesterday, and today I put a computer there (I'm typing on it now) because a lot of what I want to do here will be circuit design, PCB design and microcontroller programming.

I didn't feel like running cat5 to it so I pulled a Linksys PCI wireless card out of the box and installed it. It worked but the computer was absolutely stupid slow even though the CPU was at 2% utilization and half the memory was unused. And it wasn't even just internet stuff that was slow, something was killing performance, and when I mean killing, I mean like 45 seconds to go up one level on Windows Explorer.

I remembered that I had a little $15 Edimax USB 802.11 b/g/n adapter, one of these that's so small there's barely anything to grab on to to remove it.

I yanked out the $65 PCI card with the big antenna, and stuck this little thing into a USB slot. It's running fantastically well. I think this thing would be my choice for wireless on an otherwise unequipped machine.

I'm sure that there's got to be something actually wrong with the driver on the Linksys, just normal slowness wouldn't explain it otherwise, but the Edimax is surprisingly good and is trivial to install.

A place to work

I've been doing my electronics development on a square foot on top of my scanner at the tiny computer desk, with my parts in little cardboard boxes spread all over the place. This is just a huge pain in the ass, and I spend 80% of my time looking for parts or trying to work around other stuff, or getting a project back together after taking a week off from it.

So this week I decided that since the media room isn't getting used for anything but an unorganized place to dump junk, I was going to put a workbench there. As a side effect, since I'm actually going in the room now, I'm motivated to actually try to get the room organized.

Here's the corner that I've fought into some kind of work area (and have gathered a majority of the parts from all over the place into one spot). I still have to go to the store and buy a whole bunch of parts organizer bins (AKA Plano fishing tackle / hobby organizers), but I have a computer there, with internet, I have the drivers for the USBtinyISP and I wired up a simple test of an ATMega328 and an ISP header (I had to build and ISP breakout board to go onto the breadboard).

I also have a bunch of eBay ordering to do; I need a bunch of basic parts (capacitor assortment, etc) plus a wider range of LEDs to start with.

I'm also toying with the idea of a 3D printer. I'm not inclined to do the RepRap since I don't want to spend every weekend for a year building it, nor do I wish to become an expert at it; I'm OK with putting it together but I'd prefer to buy a complete kit. In fact I think it would be a fantastic project to do with Tom. If I do go down that road it'll probably be a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic; the ability to clear the production surface and start the next part unattended is something that is worth paying for IMO; the stuff I envision making, I'll want to make dozens of and I don't want to have to take each one off the plate and prep the surface for the next one by hand.

It really sounds like it could pay for itself by printing RepRap parts and then me selling them on eBay - parts kits take a few days to print, cost $15 in raw plastic and sell for $200+. But mainly I think I want to be able to build some specialized battery holders that there is currently no source for that I can find.