Turning Trash Into Treasure

Last week I bought a Cisco E2500 router for $10 off Craigslist since I can't afford one of the hot, new Asus RT series routers any time soon. Reception was okay but I wanted more so I soldered two antennas to the board, added a heatsink to the cpu that's just a little smaller than this guy's, and installed Tomato firmware on it. Instant $100 router or so I'd like to think. Pic below isn't mine but a pretty close replica. I seemed to have gained ~6dBm soldering on some old antennas from the hardware closet. Also if you have a compatible router, there's DD-WRT firmware, OpenWRT and a few similar others. Flashing with third party firmware does carry some risk of bricking your router, depending on your router and firmware you're looking to install. But I find DIY'ing with hardware can be pretty rewarding, especially when you replace proprietary closed source software with open source firmware/software.