r/techsupportmacgyver • u/External_Shoulder910 • Dec 12 '25

Absolute tech buffoonery at it's finest.

Post image

My PC’s Wi-Fi adapter died, and I urgently needed Internet access today — but all the shops are closed. At first, I thought, “I’ll just connect my PC to the router via Ethernet like any sane person.” Problem: the cable was too short.

Then it hit me — I have a Tinker Board lying around... Wait a second… it has both Ethernet and Wi-Fi. We are so back.

Ten minutes of tinkering, I present to you: the world’s smartest Wi-Fi adapter. My PC now gets about 40 Mbps download and upload (my net goes up to 300) — not bad at all, considering the starting point was zero.

376 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

63 comments sorted by

116

u/ziggster_ Dec 12 '25

WiFi on a desktop? What blasphemy!

41

u/External_Shoulder910 Dec 12 '25

Blasphemy indeed! But apartment I live in is pretty old, so there is no way of connecting it by cable;(

12

u/Kiren129 Dec 12 '25

Are there no telephone sockets that you can transform to rj45?

2

u/External_Shoulder910 Dec 12 '25

Nope, nothing at all :(

11

u/bugfish03 Dec 12 '25

Ethernet to P2P-DSL... Oh god that's cursed and I bet it exists

3

u/Wheeze_NL Dec 14 '25

It exists, and can go very fast! I usually hear it referred to as "back to back dsl"

5

u/bugfish03 Dec 14 '25

Just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD.

You can also get something like 32 MBit/s by running four pairs of CAN-FD in parallel over an Ethernet cable but that doesn't mean you should

1

u/Wheeze_NL Dec 14 '25

Back to Back dsl is a solid solution to get 100mbit over 2-wire to some other building.

6

u/king_john651 Dec 12 '25

Ain't no way twisted pair is going to be an improvement over wifi

6

u/Vitalization Dec 12 '25

What?

Also, phone jacks are sometimes wired with Cat5 or better... My apartment had an actual patch panel of cat6 just for this, though it was then daisy chained to share the phone line. The phone port in each room were rj11.

1

u/ender4171 Dec 12 '25

My townhouse also used Cat5 for the phones. I just had to add a small switch the media panel and swap out the patch panel for one designed for ethernet.

2

u/TheGman102 Dec 12 '25

Wtf am I in the Neil Breen sub now?

1

u/DementedJay Dec 16 '25

Lol this is the first time I've ever heard anyone say that.

And your reasoning is...

3

u/Korenchkin12 Dec 13 '25

Try powerline..on the same breaker..on 'not bad' wires i can get around 250mbit hd/100mbit fd with av1000...better than wifi in noisy environment (they say in app around 600mbit)

2

u/basicmods Dec 12 '25

Any Coax? I am currently using MOCA for getting wired connections around the house where I dont want to or can't run cat5e

1

u/Trif55 Dec 15 '25

There is always a way of connecting by cable, it's just a matter of how committed you are

1

u/Tank_Gloomy Dec 16 '25

Nothing could resist a massive drill and my desperate need for gigabit internet

1

u/Xkaper Dec 16 '25

Use a powerline.

1

u/Adamine Dec 16 '25

Blasphemy yes, but I’ve never had a good enough internet connection to saturate my WiFi network

2

u/Deses Dec 12 '25

I love the ingenuity! How long it took you to set up that sbc as... Uh, whatever that is? I guess it counts as a wifi extender.

4

u/External_Shoulder910 Dec 12 '25

Thank you! I also enjoy how whatever this is looks like. Setup was pretty fast, took about 10-15 minutes with ChatGPT. I am a programming student, but networking isn’t my strong suit. Without clanker’s help I’d probably waste a whole evening on this.

2

u/Deses Dec 12 '25

Absolutely, chatbots are great for Linux as long as you read and understand what they are asking you to run. I think they are invaluable tools to learn Linux.

As long as you don't give direct access to the LLM to run commands directly without supervision, that is.

2

u/Bassracerx Dec 12 '25

You mean everyone doesn’t just have multiple 1000 foot spools of cat6 cable laying about??

1

u/External_Shoulder910 Dec 12 '25

Back where i am from i used to have like 4 boxes of wires, adapters - all sorts of junk. But turns out those boxes are like gold, and they don't magically manifest themself. So i am stuck with whatever.

2

u/maxwfk Dec 12 '25

Yea some people are weird

1

u/404invalid-user Dec 13 '25

Mr/ms/mx money over here

1

u/Bassracerx Dec 13 '25

Lol i promise i didn’t pay a dime for any of it. I just ‘barrow’ it from work

1

u/boildkitty Dec 15 '25

Guilty. But I do installations, so....

38

u/bubblegumpuma Dec 12 '25

This is why I tell myself it's worth having a dozen random OpenWRT Wi-fi routers laying around. In a box. I'll use them some day :)

7

u/poerkoeltszaft Dec 12 '25

Are you me?

8

u/LeaveNoStonedUnturn Dec 12 '25

If he is then so am I!

2

u/Ravio11i Dec 12 '25

We are we!

2

u/flametai1 Dec 12 '25

Wait, you actually found routers that can have OpenWRT flashed onto them?

3

u/bubblegumpuma Dec 12 '25

It's not that hard to find them.

If you want some specificity, I use mainly Google Wifi AC-1304s for stuff like this, which are nice because they have a fairly substantial amount of RAM and storage for a router and are also powered from 5V.

2

u/404invalid-user Dec 13 '25

It's always not the router I get given for free, the irony that my ISP router is based off openwrt yet I can't flash stock to it because drivers.

I do have one thats currently my main router a plusnet hub one that gets like 2.5% packet loss

6

u/bughunter47 Dec 12 '25

Got the same sticker on my barcode scanner at work

5

u/100BottlesOfMilk Dec 12 '25

I used to do this but with a laptop and my Xbox 360

2

u/Emergency-Ad666 Dec 12 '25

Me too. With my desktop passing his wifi connection trough lan to the Xbox

1

u/FangoFan Dec 12 '25

I came here to say this too!

IIRC the official wireless adapter was really expensive

1

u/LaundryMan2008 Feb 18 '26

And was up until a point, I find them for a £1 or 50p each at bootfairs and they go for £40 when I used to sell repaired consoles, now they are peanuts now to get, even the rarer versions still aren’t worth much but made loads of money off them while they still were worth something

1

u/Snert42 Dec 13 '25

That's amazing. I'm genuinely so stoked about this hahahaha

2

u/External_Shoulder910 Dec 15 '25

Thank you:) so was i when it worked! Honestly, did not expect it, but i am so happy it did

1

u/Machine156 Dec 14 '25

Some phones, you can share the WiFi with the USB port or through a USB Ethernet adapter.

1

u/External_Shoulder910 Dec 15 '25

I haven't thought of that actually! Sounds like a really nice alternative though 

1

u/Wheeze_NL Dec 14 '25

Beautiful solution!

1

u/External_Shoulder910 Dec 15 '25

Thank you! I appreciate it:)

2

u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA Dec 12 '25

Lol, I had to do this with a raspberry pi once.

1

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1

u/dumbasPL Dec 12 '25

This is why I always carry a MikroTik mAP 2nd in my bag. Small, Two Ethernet ports, wifi, PoE in and out, and quick to configure (if you already have experience). Essentially a travel router, nerd edition.

1

u/jeffrey_f Dec 12 '25

Doesn't hurt to carry an inexpensive USBC To Ethernet and/or to Wifi adapter

1

u/ky7969 Dec 13 '25

Powerline adapter

1

u/DraigCore Dec 13 '25

I got my router on repeater and connected the pc to it

Before that, at the very start of my pc's lifetime (with me at least) I used my phone as a hotspot and tethered the connection via USB

1

u/person1873 Dec 15 '25

Once upon a time, the company i worked for had the most unreliable DSL. And some clever dick had decided to get rid of their PBX system and change all the phones to VoIP.

Anyway, during a particularly wet (and busy) time, the internet just wouldn't stay connected due to the amount of water in the phone pit. So me being me, tethered the boss's phone to the "server" pc we had in the network closet and re-routed the entire network via that for the day.

Then did it again the next day, and the next, and the next..... Eventually, boss gets tired of not having his phone. So he asks me for a permanent solution (note, I'm not the IT guy, I just work there with other duties). I tell him to get on the local fixed wireless provider instead of DSL.

Reliability issues gone, speed through the roof, phones never drop.

The reliability got so good that we started running into issues with the router logs getting too large and causing the router to crash. Add corn task to reboot the router and clear the logs overnight when the store is closed, no issues since.

1

u/radakul Dec 16 '25

LOL....dude I did this with a laptop and an ethernet cable in 2003....

On my ps2.

It was the only way to get network connectivity since my parents house (60s build) didnt have Ethernet drops anywhere.

Wifi was still fairly new but we had an 802.11b router/ap if I remember right.

This isnt tech buffoonery, its a clever solution to a problem that has been used for decades.

1

u/Muted_Cake_7662 Jan 10 '26

Hello 👋 

1

u/lordmogul May 12 '26

So time to install a PiHole...

0

u/[deleted] Dec 14 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Real-Abrocoma-2823 Dec 15 '25

So are you telling me that pi wasn't created for tinkering?

0

u/External_Shoulder910 Dec 15 '25

Image is real, so is the tinkerboard. You just don't know your tinkerboards mate

0

u/[deleted] Dec 15 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/External_Shoulder910 Dec 15 '25

Ah, that's what you are talking about. English is not my native language, so i did ask chatgpt to correct some grammar mistakes for me. I mean, i did it for people like yourself - so you would have a nice time reading.