Tag Archive for: router

A Very Professional Homemade CNC Router

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[Benne] has a small workshop at home so he decided to make a very versatile CNC router for his final project at school. It took him around 6 months to arrive at the result you can see in the image above and what is even more impressive is that he was only 17 years old at the time.

[Benne] used the free cad program Google Sketchup to draw the different parts he needed around the linear rails and ball screws he already had lying around. The CNC’s travel is 730x650x150mm, uses Nema 23 (3Nm) steppers, 15mm thick aluminum plates and 30x60mm aluminum extrusions. In his article, [Benne] gives great advice to those who would like to design their CNC like his, providing very useful links to manufacturers. He estimated the cost of his CNC to be around 1500 euros (about $2000). We’ll let you browse the many lines of his very detailed build log, which makes us wish to be as talented as him even at our age…


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How To Add Parental Control To Your WiFi Router – Forbes Home

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Most parental controls allow parents and guardians the ability to manage which internet pages––websites, social media platforms and messaging apps––their kids can use and at what times they can use them. Your parental controls can vary depending on the router that powers your home network. But the following features are what most parental controls share in common.

  • Limit screen time
  • Group devices
  • Filter website content
  • Pause Wi-Fi

Limit Screen Time

You can curb the amount of screen time available for your kids by restricting usage with your router’s scheduling feature. For example, schedule an internet break for homework, chores, piano practice and at dinnertime. When it’s time for “lights out”, you can shut off the internet at a designated time for school nights and a different hour for weekends.

Group Devices

Many routers allow parents and guardians to group devices by users. This enables you to schedule shutoff for a younger child’s smartphone and tablet on weeknights at 7:30 p.m., turn off your teen’s off desktop and gaming console a couple of hours later at 9:30 p.m. and keep your own connection active for video streaming and when you need to work late.

You can do this simply by naming each device such as “dad’s laptop” or “David’s tablet” if you didn’t do this when you set up your electronic device. You can rename devices easily in the General/Settings menu on each device.

Filter Website Content

Routers with effective parental controls can filter website content. Filtering will allow you to restrict or blacklist certain types of content such as adult entertainment websites that are inappropriate for children. You can also restrict content based on topics and keywords. Consider using SafeSearch, a tool that blocks millions of adult websites.

Pause Wi-Fi

If you want to keep distractions to a minimum but feel the need to set up restrictions or daily scheduling, consider pausing your Wi-Fi. You can often sync your home networking router  with virtual assistants such as Google Assistant and Siri. Just say, “Siri, pause the kid’s Wi-Fi” and turn it back on after dinner.

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Peel Apart Your ISP’s Router

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Whether your home Internet connection comes by ADSL, fibre, cable, or even satellite, at some point in the chain between your ISP and your computer will be a router in your home. For some of us it’s a model we’ve bought ourselves and loaded up with a custom distro, but for the majority it’s a box supplied by our ISP and subject to their settings and restrictions. [Paddlesteamer] has just such a router, a Huawei model supplied by the Turkcell ISP, and decided to do a little snooping into its setup.

In a tale of three parts, we see the device unravel, from uncovering a shell to reverse engineering its update process, to delving in its firmware and finally removing all its restrictions entirely. It’s a fascinating process in which we learn a lot, such as the way a man-in-the-middle attack is performed on the router’s connection tot he ISP, or that it contains an authorised SSH key seemingly giving Huawei a back door into it. You may never do this with your ISP’s router, but it pays to be aware of what can be put in your home by them without your realising it.

The Golden Age of router hacking may be behind us as the likes of the Raspberry Pi have replaced surplus routers as a source of cheap Linux boards, but  as this shows us there’s still a need to dive inside a router from time to time. After all, locked-down routers are hardly a new phenomenon.

Via Hacker News.


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Router Rebooter Without The Effort

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It’s one of the rituals of our age, rebooting the family router when the bandwidth falters. Flip the power, and after half a minute or so your YouTube video starts up again. Consumer-grade router hardware is not the most reliable computing equipment you will own, as [Nick Sayer] found out when the router at his vacation home wasn’t reliable enough to support his remote monitoring equipment. His solution is an auto-reboot device, that power-cycles the offending device on command.

An obvious method might be to switch the mains supply, but instead he’s taken the simpler option of switching the DC from the router’s wall wart power supply with a cunning arrangement of three MOSFETs to keep the router defaulting to on under all conditions except when it is commanded to power down by the ATtiny microcontroller overseeing it. This chip provides extra fail-safe and debouncing functions to ensure no accidental rebooting.

Driving the circuit is a Raspberry Pi that handles the house monitoring, on which a Python script checks for Internet access and asks for a reboot if there is none. For extra safety it requires access to be down for a sustained period before doing so in case of a router firmware upgrade.

This isn’t the first router rebooter, for a mains-switching ESP8266 take a look at this one.

Router picture: Asim18 [CC BY-SA 3.0]


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