Recently I came up with some neat idea of hooking up an alphanumeric LCD display to the serial port of mipsbe based routerboard (411 for example). I am aware that this would need a huge job of scripting. There are numerous ways of connecting standard well known HD44780 controller-based LCD displays via serial port and they work great on PC’s. The purpose of this would be a very convenient testing/alignment solution, as we are now fooling around with some integrated panel antennas and a laptop, shouting what signal levels are seen. It is not generally needed to absolutely avoid the use of laptop, but having a nice LCD screen showing the signal level of desired AP just before your eyes would be very handy. Further improvements would include integrated rechargeable batteries inside the equipment container of the antenna, because there are plenty of space inside. And if going further, using RB433 with two WiFi NIC’s would enable the total wireless testing solution as you could connect to it from your laptop wirelessly. And yes, I know about audible alignment monitor feature, but unfortunately it’s not enough for us.
Could anyone provide some input about this idea? Is it even worth to try? Maybe I’m missing something here completely obvious. I searched the forum, there was something similar going on, but nothing specific, so I decided to start a new topic.
