Welcome to my project.  I purchased my ePods and did the 2.4 Full hack as instructed at Randy's excellent Hack Your Epods! site.  Special thanks to Graham Howe for posting this page, and all his input on the ePods discussion board site, as run by Ken Segler.

 

I took pictures as I went through the project with a Nikon Coolpix 990 borrowed from the graphic arts department where I work, it's a 3.34 megapixel camera, but its settings were funky and some of the pictures are slightly out of focus.  If any of the pictures lack detail, I can e-mail you the 2048x1536 original, but the focus is still not great on some.

 

Introduction:

I have an intense dislike for dongles, and personally use a Xircom Realport Type II PCMCIA card in my laptop because it's got integrated jacks for Ethernet and modem.  This is not possible with the ePods because type II cards will not fit in the single Type III slot provided with the ePods, so it was time to dismantle that bad boy and integrate a jack that's not only sturdier, but prevents you from losing your dongle altogether. Doing this is certainly reversible (unless you screw up your PCMCIA pins, but you won't if you're not totally reckless), but requires dismantling your ePods again.

To begin, let's make sure you want to do this before you start.  You should be sure of the following before you recreate this project:

Things you'll need:

  1. Philips screwdriver (I used an Xcelite P12S, which was perfect)
  2. Pliers or equivalent (to take apart PCMCIA card)
  3. Soldering iron and solder (mine is a $8 Radio Shack 30W)
  4. 24 AWG wire
  5. Wire cutters/strippers
  6. EC2T Ethernet card
  7. RJ45 Jack (pop open your dongle and get one just like the one soldered to the PCB in the dongle) 
  8. Epoxy or equivalent
  9. Electrical Tape
  10. Some kind of Xacto knife or fine saw for cutting a piece out of the side panel
  11. and last, but not least, an ePodsOne

Let's get started!