iMac AirPort using orinoco silver

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dankephoto's picture
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iMac AirPort using orinoco silver

Just a quickie hack, I plopped a Silver orinoco card into my daughter's SL iMac . . .

dan k

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so . . . it works!

where it works fine.

I've been wondering if there's physical room in an iMac for a regular Lucent-chipped PC card, so on acquiring an iMac AP adapter I gave it a try. I had to remove the plastic casing around the orinoco card's antenna, and the antenna part of the card's PCB has to be bent slightly to get it to fit around the MLB's plastic AP-card-adapter clippy, but otherwise it fit fine.

As expected, the AP SW in both OSes 9 and 10 see the card as a pukka AP card.

dan k

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If you can find an oem silver

If you can find an oem silver card it won't have the built in antenna.

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re: oem silver card

I've seen literature describing these jobbies, but never have I actually seen one for sale. Any hints where one might find 'em? I'm sure I'm not the only bloke who'd like to know, since the antenna-less formfactor is functionally identical to the AP card.

Anyhow, the point of my post - a 'standard' card with antenna works too.

dan k

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I got mine off e-bay. Took a

I got mine off e-bay. Took a while for one to show up though.

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So what's the deal then, with

So what's the deal then, with the "swapped pins" theory? Shouldn't an airport card work in a pc slot?

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re: I got mine off e-bay.

Hey Barry, can you post the FCC ID and model number off that bad boy? A digipic would be nice too! Many TIA!

re: "swapped pins"

I'm curious about this too, but haven't had any luck figuring the diff. AP cards just don't work in a PC card slot. I've got scans of various orinoco-based cards (see this thread), but all that shows is that even nearly identical cards (such as the Sony 150s and AP) aren't alike under the skin, upshot being I still haven't a clue what pins are swapped, nor how to unswap them. Not a big issue for me anyhow since the price of AP cards skyrocketed.

dan k

Jon
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There's also been the issue o

There's also been the issue of forced incompatibility. The swapped pins idea is easy to fix in software , esp. if the Mac singals a few pins and finds an AP card ID. Then it just does a bitwise swap on the two certain pins and it all works. Stick the AP card in a regular PC Card slot, and it doesn't work. I'd imagine that a fix could be done to make one work in a PC if one finally figured the pins out, but as you mentioned, the cost of an AP card is gone inverse to the cost of an old Lucent card, compared to when they were first released in the late 90's. If somebody wants to use an Ap card in a PC, they might as well sell off the Ap card and get a boat load of cash for it, then buy one or several Lucent cards. heck, you could sell off an Ap card and probably get enough money to get a plain Lucent card and max the RAM on an older laptop...

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Sorry, no fcc id on it.

IMAGE(http://idisk.mac.com/barrywoods/Public/silver.jpg)

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I don't know if this helps...

... but when I "slipped" my truemobile 1150 into the ap slot on my pismo it showed up as an airport card. too bad it won't fit inside with the keyboard in place.

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