Misusing the AirPort card slot?

[DanaTheElf]

I'm curious whether it's something that's been attempted or theoretically possible - the Airport Card slot is just a weird PCMCIA slot, right? Has anyone done anything fun with that? Even just using the interface to add safer, more modern wireless capabilities through that interface would be pretty cool.

 

[Byrd]

About the only other card that fits is an Orinoco Silver or Gold PCMCIA wifi card, it's picked up as an Airport device in the slot. I don't think anything else will fit, it's not the full PCMCIA standard or pinout.

An ethernet to wifi bridge would provide most needs for modern wireless capabilities.

https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/chop-orinoco-silver-pcmcia-card-into-airport-slot.49206/

 

[DanaTheElf]

Yeah, I did see that; it's interesting, but I was more curious about something new and custom, rather than using it for its intended purpose with something sort of unintended but contemporary. xD

 

[Byrd]

It would be cool to have a CF booting card in there. However it’s not even Cardbus standard it’s not anything, it’s just enough for wifi communication and nothing else unfortunately.

 

[DanaTheElf]

Ah, what a shame... seems such a waste to have a potential interface just not doing anything, but custom designing a new card for modern wi-fi is pretty silly when a cheap dongle can handle it with zero effort.

 

[Durosity]

Ah, what a shame... seems such a waste to have a potential interface just not doing anything, but custom designing a new card for modern wi-fi is pretty silly when a cheap dongle can handle it with zero effort.

Ah but cheap dongles didn’t exist back then, plus not ideal for a computer you’re moving around with you.. the USB port would likely end up getting damaged. Thing is.. back when the airport system first appeared the need for the PC Card slot was already starting to become limited. I had a Pismo with the airport card in the internal slot, and a SCSI card in the PC Card slot, and I used that SCSI card a lot for the first year or so.. but then I got a FireWire cd burner and suddenly it became defunct.. I don’t think the slot was used on any of my PowerBooks after that!

 

[chelseayr]

durosity, to our own possibly-hot personal opinion here but funny enough I always thought its use was sometimes somewhat backward re that the small laptop got almost nothing useful and as usual no means to add it either, while the large counterpart had too many ports of all type all over it yet it came with a somewhat mostly-useless cardbus or worser did provide expresscard but the wrong type for such a very large shell otherwise .. meanwhile sd-to-cf or even sd-to-eth etc barely ever exists at all for the small laptop in question

not sure if its just me but the only reason I mentioned it that way is because the few times I have curiously helped someone out a bit with their 17" or 19" laptop in general, one of the problem that comes up seemingly too often is that the fact the fat shell only has a tiny 34-type slot whereas yet for some reason a lot of non-niche expresscards are sold in the 54-type form firstmost instead

on a very non-68kmla note I know that the 2400c was designed for a particular usecase that somewhat mimic their own market inbetween the powerbook 100-series and eventual g3-series but .. on the other hand fujitsu rather some time ago made quite a few damned laptops that were very small yet still came with the same variety of ports that a 17" laptop would had, including cardbus!

[and before I finally post this post, heres an interesting photo I found from the web https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UhDV2z9Fdpo/maxresdefault.jpg .. the left laptop has cardbus, modem, fw, 2x audio (unlike even a much bigger macbook), vga, and even optical drive all in that very purse-sized size]

 

[lauland1]

I've always wondered about the potential for using the slot for something else also.

It will depend highly on what kind of controller Apple used for it...is it actually anything close to a real PCMCIA controller, or is it just a hack that does just enough to handle a few extremely particular wifi cards?

(And my guess is the only reason the orinoco works, almost out of the box, is that it is very close hardware to the actual apple airport cards)

And, of course, this may vary from model to model...so, for example, how close it is to a real PCMCIA slot may be quite different in early vs later machines.

It'd be interesting to look at the OF device tree for what it looks like...and running linux, what does the port show up as a pci device? (Take any apple operating system possible obfuscation out of the equation).

 

[joevt]

It'd be interesting to look at the OF device tree for what it looks like...and running linux, what does the port show up as a pci device? (Take any apple operating system possible obfuscation out of the equation).

You could dump the PCI info in Open Firmware using my lspci for Open Firmware script.
Include output from dump-device-tree and devalias and printenv as well.
https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/erics-apple-network-server-700-tinker-log.3987/post-41227

 

[François]

The limiting factor might be the lack of driver for anything besides an AirPort card…

 

[Chopsticks]

i swear i read somewhere years ago that the airport slot swapped a few pins around to prevent normal PCMCIA cards working, but the airport cards would still in fact work in a PC laptops PCMCIA slot,

in the 2010's i tried out a few different card in my eMac and some got detected and some didnt, though none had mac drivers so i never went further then that