PCMCIA Cards Hiding in Linksys Routers

What if I told you that there's an unexpected piece of hardware hidden inside some of these

routers

? An mcia PC card or PC card, as they were later renamed in 1995. Mcia PC

cards

can be considered a kind of precursor to USB, an industry-defined one. standard that allows you to connect Wi-Fi flash memory modems and all kinds of other peripherals to laptops and computers. Here are a couple of examples of PC

cards

. Now my understanding is that manufacturers like Lynus were already making these mcia Wi-Fi cards for PCs, so we would just make a slot inside their first few

routers

for them to fit in, we'll go into my link collection to look for one, we'll probably lose a few battles of drivers with Linux trying to make it work and Windows 7 won't slow us down either. let's get into it.

I have some specimens for our adventure today. I'm pretty sure some of them have a PC card inside, but I'm not sure which one, so I think we'll open the oldest one physically. The largest ones I have, leave us with some options. This one and this one are all fw11 S4 and you can see they aren't even Cisco branded, so they were probably produced before Cisco's Linkus bot in 2003, like Lynus. make things smaller over time, so I suspect this smaller one that has an identical model to these larger ones here will actually be newer, so we won't bother with the one that leaves us with the two big ones here now. it's possible that these wrt54gs, these wireless G routers have PC cards inside them and in fact, if you recognize that this ties these things together, there's a good chance you're repurposing one of these 54 GS back in the day because Lyus was still making PC cards Wireless G and it is possible.

You know, some variant of these without the nice edge here is actually inside some of these routers, but we'll try our luck with some B things first because they're older and it seems like they're more likely to have what we want despite having what same. model number and form factor there's actually quite a bit of difference between these two units, so we have the 2.4GHz B advertised a little more prominently on this one and it's a little simpler, calling itself a router. wireless access point. about the instant broadband series ether fast wireless hotspot, it is advertised as a cabled dsl router, so yes, there is quite a difference here, they are from above and the existence of the linkis logo here is practically a clue when you look On these Cisco was not involved soon, CCO down, they dropped it and just kept this fun fact with the original Linkis lettering and I also noticed that the antennas on this one on the left have a metal base so there is a connector metal there, none of the other antennas have that, including this one, let me get one for you, so despite it being about the same age as it's plastic, I'm thinking about this one on the left since it has the best hardware and a type older sounding marketing on the front.

This will be the best, but this is probably the oldest. It's probably worth noting that this is the only one I have that has these really nice metal connectors. None of these make them all have plastic connectors except if I bought this high gain range extender kit, they are obviously much longer antennas, they have nice metal on the end, but that of course would have been like an upgrade from luxury so to speak so yeah the rest are just plastic so the first one. What we do, of course, is remove the antennas. I can't understand how nice these are and then there are some nuts on the back that turn very easily on both sides and then we voided our warranty very quickly.

I'm going to give you the inside scoop on these rubber feet, just when these things get old they just fall off. I don't remember that being a problem in the early 2000s and mid 2000s when I was using the 54g units, they all have the same affliction. the feet just fall off on this one it's already missing one the remaining feet on this one aren't too loose yet but I don't know if the material shrinks as it ages or something but it's very common that it will just fall off and you won't even need use a tool or they are already missing the front legs that hide two small screws and then I think you just fiddle with it a little and eventually you can get it. to the antennas just drop into the case the antenna connectors um I'm going to do this very carefully and I'll come back yeah, it doesn't take much, you can just push like this and Separate without breaking anything or losing any pieces of plastic.

At this point, we need to remove the shield and it's going to be a bit of a pain. There are just blobs of little blobs of solder everywhere. It's not like a C64 or something. I can cut it with scissors, so I'll have to use the wick. I think to take it away, this is interesting. Some quality control marks are actually on Sharpie and a hand-written pencil, some kind of verification pass they probably did at the factory. Quick view to the front. so I'm going to remove these little blobs of solder, if you're not familiar with the solder wick, you heat it up and apply it to the solder and it literally wicks the solder into this braid and it's not my preferred method of desoldering, but it is It's actually a good way to clean up the work after you've desoldered with, you know, the little pump gun or something, and I think it's my best option here, but I think it's going to be extremely frustrating to remove this because even when I use Wick. this weld will still be a pretty good link I think on most of these points, but we'll start with this and then start putting some pry tools underneath and see where that takes us.

This one is particularly complicated. Back there, oh look at that, even though it's not actually connected that way from the factory, the solder goes into the braid, okay of course, even after removing the solder, it's still basically completely connected, so my thought here is that we will begin. I'll get some tools down here and pry it up. I'm not particularly worried about damaging this. I'm not going to put it. I'm not putting it back on anyway, so it's just for some kind of protection. I'll leave it. You know how I get along, some of the points actually come on the other side of the board, so you can see where a little metal tab sticks out of this thing, but none of them have solder, so they're all free and I can't to get it.

I don't know how to remove this piece of plastic from the dashboard to see it better. It has a simple trimming mechanism that I can't seem to do. I can't seem to get it to move. well we're getting somewhere, look I've resorted to taking the iron and heating it up while prying with some other tool, it's a bit difficult to film, we're really close, I think if I just heat this up. it's off and look we have a wireless B

pcmcia

card there's the slot it's connecting to it has a little daughter board for the antennas yeah I wasn't sure how many of these I was going to have to open until I found one and this old one proved to be the right choice the next question is does it come out easily we have to figure it out for science oh it's in this little tray okay I'm going to poke around a bit I don't want to break anything this is fascinating it's not like a socket it's just some pins bent at a 90° angle and the board receives them that's fascinating look how they did it wow I think I need to remove the board from this plastic backing because I need to Desolder this little case or this little holder that the board is on daughter and I think that's why I couldn't slide it out.

One of the posts has a screw. You know, I don't even know if this router works. I probably should have tried it first there we go, well I don't feel like desoldering them and I want to put this back together and that would pretty much do it so it guarantees that I would never put it back together so I'm just going to Bend these little retaining clips to get them out of the way, okay, yeah, now you can see it's getting up. Can I slide it? Yes, look at this. There's my wireless B PC mcia card.

Now we can connect it to a computer and almost. it definitely won't work because it won't have drivers, we'll see. I guess here is the fascinating pinout. I guess that's exactly what it looks like on a laptop, maybe a little sturdier, really cool, now we just need a computer to put this on. lyus PC card and I think this IBM Thinkpad t60 will help us today. Andy's donation of Sunfire v440. Fame sent me this a couple of months ago and I've been looking for an excuse to try it. Released in 2006, it has an Intel Cino Duo Mobile on the 32-bit side.

I believe this is the 60GB hard drive model, so this would have cost you around $1,400 or so in 2006 and this is a slightly historically significant ThinkPad in that it was the last one that still had the brand name IBM Thinkpad, so Lenovo was fully involved and built them. I mean you can even see the logo right there and the t61. The one right after this is when they removed the IBM logo. I think this machine tells a pretty interesting story about old and new, at least in terms of a thousand technologies, it has a built-in Ethernet modem of course, USB audio and of course the PC card slot that we will use today and, on the other side, more USB slots.

Really nice DVD ROM and down here you have the hard drive compartment and inside this thing you have a SATA interface along with the cutest, rustiest 60GB drive you've ever seen. It looks like it was made in May 2007. It's a 7200 RPM Hitachi so this would have been pretty good for this, the day we are going to upgrade this machine it runs fine it has Linux but I think it's a really good upgrade we'll add an SSD in there so we'll try it out for fun see if I can get it working and then I'm really excited to try out my completely legit copy of Windows 7 Pro 64 bit that I bought in college somehow this has survived like a lot of other moves , but anyway we are screwed, I need a 32-bit version so we will activate the old DVD burner setup and I know I could use a USB boot and all that is still fun, more fun this way and in fact I have a Windows 7 Pro 32-bit key on the back of this so you know we're legit, it would have shipped with Windows XP of course, and more contemporary could have been Vista, but I've been thinking about Windows 7, it came out in 2009, so this would have run him. and of course it has the sticker on the back so that's what we're going to use.

Let's put this hard drive in the cart. It had these rubber bumpers on there. There's nothing really holding it in place other than the friction of these rubber bumpers. pretty hard to get out, I thought I was going to break this little handle they had there, so I think we have to get this tray out pretty simple, so the question is, when I put this whole thing back together, will it line up like the other one? . I wonder if you will have problems with a single tab unit. I don't think so, but we'll see, here we go.

I can't really tell if it's there, we'll know when we turn it on. I guess so, just the rubber in there holding it on without screws or anything. I took it apart months ago so I'm going to look for that screw every time I experiment and take something apart randomly and I'm not going to mess with this for a while, I put the screws here and I don't see it, this could be what could work, that didn't work, fix this the old fashioned way for now and I'll have to look for that screw. down, let's plug this thing in, it's got some custom speed mods, don't worry, here we go, it's got a load, believe it or not, look what we're working with here, see if it recognizes that drive, I guess, media test. the glitch can't boot from any device here we go, we're in good shape, although you see the CD ROM drive is first, then the USB, then the drive I just installed and you see it's 1,000 GBT 1 terab, so I think we're going to be fine, I guess I don't actually know if this unit works, but I guess it works fine, controls, removes, makes driving noises, see what happens, here we go, there's something therapeutic or nostalgic about installing Windows, whatever Windows version and I mean back.

When you did this in the past, this might have been like your only computer, so if something went wrong, you couldn't just go to lios or whatever and do a search, you'd figure it out through trial and error, usually, or if you're really desperate, you went to a friend's house and used his computer to connect to the internet, you couldn't exactly get your cell phone out, I mean, that wasn't going to help you, beautiful, I haven't installed Windows 7 in a very long time. , very long could eat my words about USB being less fun. It's been running at 0% there for about 5 minutes.

I was about to give up and then we hit 1%. In 10 minutes I could still give up. I'm doing a USB right now oh we're browsing we're left with the DVD we're on let's see what we're working with here yeah four gigs of RAM that's pretty good and see all thehard drive of course let's see if it can improve our resolution a little bit, maybe something like that, yes, this is a nice little laptop, what version of iie came with eight? So of course this thing already has Wi-Fi capabilities, it's a bit redundant, but that's not the point. so I'm going to close this for a second and show you something so here's the slot here's another PC card just a flat flash card from a Cisco router and when you push it all the way in it's flush and then this little guy helps you to get it out right, it's pretty simple, now the problem is that this one can't go in completely because of the shoulders of the daughter card, so you can see there's an overlap there and it will stop it.

From the beginning, however, I'm making some contact, so I haven't tried it. These are hot swappable so let's turn it back on and see what it does, otherwise we may have to get a little creative so I haven't installed it. any of Lenovo drivers or anything. I hope you're smart enough to already have the PC MCI slot controllers, we'll see, so I'll slide it in. I don't think I'll see it, so it may take a couple of troubles. The drivers for this slot we'll check out device manager in a second or it's actually not working at all, of course Windows sees the adapter bus so it's a physical connection issue we'll have to resolve for the record. the adapter is working you can hear a very very faint kind of whine and then when I eject it it doesn't understand this card we know it was turned off so this works so I was hoping that this daughter board would just pop out but I I moved I pulled it and pulled it, you know a little bit, and it looks like it's some kind of circuit board that they've locked in here and I don't want to risk prying it because it can be a pretty destructive process, but I'm looking. on these little ears and they just lead to empty pads, so we have traces on them and the pads don't go anywhere, so I'm going to do something maybe a little controversial.

I'm going to cut them, so I'm going to score them with a knife and then break them. Well, if that broke, you'll have to forgive me. We're doing some science here, so the dream is that this is just a consumer card that Linkis was releasing. on those routers and Windows doesn't see a problem at least I hope it recognizes something, what I hope is it recognizes nothing or something it doesn't know what to do with, so let's check it out, it sees, I haven't broken it. It's completely yes, it doesn't have drivers for it, okay, but the card exists, it's called Instant Wireless PC Card, that's a clue, so let's look that up online.

I think it's one of these lynxis that had an instant wireless PC card that of course they sold, which makes sense, they just put them in the routers and they only have to develop one thing, so what I'm going to do is to search for drivers for this and see where we get the file from the Internet. I had some instant wireless controllers. Oh no, that's not good. Funny that my Windows 11 machine could open this configuration file but Windows 7 doesn't like it, honestly I thought I would avoid all this with Windows 7, I thought I would be old enough.

Oh, no, well, I'm continuing with the song I recorded it on. a disk and now it likes the installer, look at this, oh it has noises when you click the buttons, what are the chances of this working? It's definitely just one of these WPC 11, so here we're going to reboot, that's not right, it doesn't recognize it right. I have the oldest version of the drivers I could get, install the PC card, this is definitely an older installer that doesn't hold its breath. Oh that's what the other drivers did, it doesn't see it, it doesn't even start if it doesn't think you have the adapter there.

You look at this very nice icon so again the adapter bus works and you see you have this instant wireless pc card but you don't know what to do with it so I guess I'll try Windows XP well that was a nightmare . I couldn't get Windows XP to install this. I tried different isos with USB burning disks and by the way all the isos had the SATA drivers. I made sure I had the correct iso. Nothing I tried the F5 trick. when you're booting up to try to set things up, no matter what you've done, setup hangs when you start windows, I'd leave it for 30 minutes to an hour.

You know, these things have taken me a long time to get through. that screen, but nothing gave up, but we have made important progress. This thing is running an auntu 510 live CD from late 2005. I think little Breezy Badger, we got the card reviewed. Look at this, we can do a card control ID. it's on the socket zero instant wireless network PC card, but a little more information says version 0102, a little more information than Windows told us. You can also do card control information and then the slot gets the same information, just now we present it a little differently if you do lspci, of course we've come this far so we know this is true, but the jumper the card bus is obviously working, you can see the card, you know it's there, now I'm going to take the card out and you'll hear it beep once, which means it knows it's removed, okay, I'll put it back in, you'll hear two high-pitched beeps, that's the old way the card control systems tell you that it thinks it's configured, okay, now we'll see a D message that's going to give us information about all the hardware changes that are happening and here we can see it talking about this card, it says it is an interel 076 firmware, I don't like it, it says intercell firmware older than o.8, several features It may not be compatible and it has the name Prism 1 station.

Now I have been able to find other cards that use Intersil's Prism 2 chipset, including later versions of Linkx, this instant wireless network PC card, but I don't see anything. using prism 1 just a few examples of prism 2 so I think this is a pretty old card and I definitely couldn't find any version of the software as early as 1.02, there were only a couple of versions in the archive and you saw me install them. but this is where it gets really interesting if we issue an IW config which is like if config but for wireless devices in the Linux world you see it has a nickname of prism 1 you know it has the correct frequency and speed it just doesn't have a station at the that connect, so I think it is working on Linux.

It could be possible? Linux wireless networking from the early 2000s is easier than Windows. It's hard to believe. Let's try to connect this to a network. I could just connect it to my home network, but that's it. Wouldn't that be fun, let's take this one off the stack and see if it works. This one looks incredibly unhappy. The number saw him do that before. I guess I'll try to reset it. There is a button on the back. Yeah, that one doesn't work. So hot I should have taken the card out of that one, let's try this little guy, yeah, much healthier, see if we can talk to him, this is a Windows XP machine connected to that router on the same default network, we might have than reset it.

I don't think I've used that one before, so it's possible that it's already set up and that's what it looks like: just press this little button on the back for about 30 seconds and now we can access it, it's reset. I think it's admin no password no password no password just admin password okay I mean these elders just start exploiting a network that's right linkis uh let's make sure we don't have any of those in the neighborhood clabsis okay, that thing has a This computer's wireless network is wired as 19216811, so let's see if we can connect that laptop.

It's been a long time since I used the IW setup. It's strange that I call it eth zero. I would expect him to call it zero WL. maybe that's an omen, I think you're going like this, yeah, okay, we have a problem, we were so close, uh, I needed Pudo, so now he thinks eth zero is in clabsis. I have setup, still not seeing anything, but maybe. okay, 5 hours later, this is what I know, everything was restored. Now I can configure a SID like this and if we go back, you have it configured now over an if configuration, you see it and you know it has eth zero, it's called eth zero.

I was doing a little research. Older devices will call themselves eth zero even though they are wireless L, we can use the IW list command and if we say eth zero scan to see if it can scan, it says it can't, so that's the track number. one that we're fighting with the drivers right now and now what we're going to do is try to activate that interface and it times out and if we go back to the old D message, we get tons of complaints about not being able to issue commands to the card and these configuration codes Unknown key pressed cannot enable Mac port all kinds of errors that really yes, it is an error while issuing commands, this really implies to me that we are having problems with the drivers I tried to launch Auntu 404 is here hoping it is compatible with this intersil 076 and it just crashes.

I can't load it or install it or anything, so we're having the classic device driver fight. I thought about deciphering this broken one. An open one, you know? one that was doing the diagnostic light flashing just visually, this one is a little newer looking, but you'll have to trust me when I say, well, first, I couldn't open it, I don't know how to separate it. but I'm looking through these little vents and there's no card there, so it's definitely a different design, a more modern design, oh yeah, and after running the if setup to try to raise eth zero, it misses a Ton of and they, uh, you can't fix it until you physically take the card out and put it back in, big mess, well, I was actually able to get the Auntu 4 live CD up and running.

Isn't this a site to behold? from Sor at least? We are struggling with this. We can look at these old versions of Auntu and feel nostalgic about them, but it's pretty much the same story in message D. He thinks it's a Hermes chipset. We are getting errors about issuing the -16 command that we saw before. you know it's a prism one chipset, it has the same internal firmware before 0 eight, it's not supported, probably our main problem here, so we're running into some obstacles here. The first is that this card is very old, so it claims to have at least in the station name, which is an inter-cell firmware version of a prism chip, complaints about how old it is even in this older version of Linux, there are several Linux drivers, one is ironic: that's what we're trying to use here, which should support the prism chipsets, but I don't see anything that supports prism 1.

I only see mentions of prism 2, so That's our biggest problem here. Another obstacle is that you know, my will to live. I'm sure we could install a version of Linux here. and start playing with drivers and playing around and finally finding an old one, assuming there is an old one that supports this older prism chip, but it's pretty complicated, this is the only physical mcia slot for pc I have, so right now I have been turning to Live CDs Auntu 4 was the first Abun on Live CD, so I can only fool around, it's not like I can roll back a VM very easily and play with the drivers.

I'm still willing to consider this a victory because this even acknowledges. It seems like it feels like a driver issue. I'm going to subject you to one more OS attempt here. I have a copy of Debian 3 from 2002. I think Debian was a little slower at accepting drivers. This thing is from 2001 or so 2000, so I hope by 03 they had drivers that supported this older guy. I'm going to do a full install of that and if that doesn't work, we'll have a mcia PC consolation surprise to go. Well, a short-lived look, this version of Debian doesn't seem to have SATA drivers and, as to my aforementioned point about the will to live, I don't want to deal with that today, so let's get into the mcia consolation PC award .

Well, me. I'm a little disappointed that this was going to be a pretty nasty setup. I have to admit that we are lucky to have found one and I am really impressed that Windows understood it and we were able to get a lot of information from Linux. pretty good again, just a problem with the driver. I found people online from forum posts over 20 years old complaining about very similar D message logs about the prisma 1 and that old firmware and the suggestion seems to be to install newer firmware on these but even if I could find that it wouldn't I don't know if I would like to do it because I wouldn't be able to put it back into the router or I highly suspect that with a different firmware it won't work on this so that would be disappointing but I'm almost doneinstall Windows 7 on that thing again and we're going to take a look at this Linky Wireless G Laptop Adapter Inbox Full and we're going to open it up and see what's inside.

Also works with Wireless B. This is our mcia PC Consolation Prize for the video. At least we'll get a PC card working today, that entire inbox. The wireless G card can also work with wireless B, so obviously we're going to need this guy, by the way, there are some inell prism drivers online. for Windows XP I tried them and they didn't work interestingly enough. The error message it shows about not finding the adapter is exactly the same as the Linka one we saw before, so they must have been sharing software, let's see what we have. I think it's a new inbox, but I was fooled by the shrink wrap before, so it was fun to buy all the stuff in the box, you know, and I think this was like $10 shipped or something.

Start here, run the CD first before plugging in your device, this makes you appreciate how Good USB, does this really look new? By the way, you don't have to do any of this crap anymore, you just plug things in, got our registration card, fill it out later, some kind of quick start guide, nothing, nothing special, oo. gaming adapters we'll cover that in a future video offering some of their stuff Wireless compact flash cards now that's something that would be interesting let's open up this guy Can I save this sticker? It matters to me? I can look at that uhhuh new Yeah, they were obviously making these and on some of these older units here they would just put them in the router.

It is for Windows XP. Maybe Windows 7 has been our problem all this time, but let's try it on the Windows 7 machine. It doesn't seem to be able to read the disk oh my god, hell, we're under attack too oh oh dear, yeah, can't read this one disk, this is version 3.1 which of course is not in the archive so it would have been nice to be able to archive this. I'll try it on my other machine, well I don't know, I was able to read it on another machine and burn an ISO and I have it mounted here, let's see where we get it from.

Linkus loves the special little fitter of him, moment of truth. he asks me after the installer to insert the adapter, we have a power light, he sees it, it is installing the driver so okay, I think let's go next and then nothing happens, he opens the program. I guess here is the software. The site inspection adapter is down. I don't know. I'm going to be optimistic once again and assume this is working. I just need to choose an SSID to connect to. Let's connect the other one. This will obviously work perfectly. Oh my god, he's doing the same thing. the other is the wrong power adapter.

I always forget that the link used to be 5 volts and then they changed everything to 12 so I guess it's fine, that means the other one is probably fine too, just pretend you didn't see it anyway. It's going to work great, this thing doesn't seem to be able to scan. I guess I'll edit it. Yes, I don't think this program really likes Windows 7, but in the Windows adapter settings. you know about Linkis Wireless G and I think I can say connect and there is excellent signal strength from our super antennas, yes even though we are connected the software driver should control that link light but Windows took over so I think We've done it folks, we've officially connected to a network with a PC card.

Well, this wasn't exactly where I expected this project to end up, but I'll still call it a win. We found one of these PC cards and got it working. It is very fun to play with these mcia cards for PC. I have a few more on the way and I think this was just a controller issue. I wasn't exactly doing myself any favors by pulling one of these out of a router. We will have more PC cards in the future and a warning many times, because of the small and thin form factor, they would have a dongle that would slide into the computer and some sort of cable would come out of it. for your modem or Ethernet or whatever the case may be and it will be very common that you can find one of the cards but not the dongle which renders the card useless so be careful with this, this gave me some memories of dealing with wireless adapters Linux in the past, yes, I could sit down, install Linux on this machine and play with this for hours and hours.

Maybe one day, you know, have a few beers and do that. I don't know if I'll film. but I will have an update if I do, but yes, I was there, I was there when it was written. No, I don't need to do it again. I was pretty elated just to be able to identify it. this on Linux and I see it and Windows also recognized it. I hope you enjoyed following it. Sorry for the quality of the screenshot. I couldn't get this to output VGA to my capture card, but if you like stuff like this and want to support the channel, you can check me out on patreon.

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