My wife is disabled and can’t get out of the house too well. She wants to watch the birds and the nature around our lake. So I decided to install a high-def, high zoom PoE PTZ camera in one of the trees facing the lake.

That tree is 180 ft away from the house. Of course I could punch a hole in the wall of the house and run a long solid-core CAT6 cable underground all the way to the lakefront, but I’d rather not.

But the tree is only 15 ft from our cottage. So all I needed was a Wifi bridge in the cottage connected to the main Wifi router in the house, and connected to a PoE injector on its LAN side, and then I can run a short ethernet cable from the injector out the cottage to the camera in the tree.

So I did some rummage in my box of mystery e-waste and found a router-looking thing that I remember rescuing from my neighbor’s trash many years ago (a neighbor from another city in another country). I didn’t dumpster-dive it mind you, I just took it from him as he was throwing it away. He told me the thing didn’t light up anymore. I remember my wife scolding me for collecting yet another piece of dead electronics too that day.

I looked up the model number - a Cisco Linksys WES610N and sure enough, it’s a Wifi bridge. Not a recent one, but hey, it’s better than no Wifi bridge.

I opened it up, quickly saw that the 12V socket’s ground was desoldered, soldered it back onto the PCB, and what do you know: it lives!

I connected it to our Wifi, then put it in the cottage 160 ft away and it works just fine. It’s 15 years old but it’s perfectly serviceable.

Next time my wife tells me to stop being a packrat, I’ll point her to the birds on her computer screen 🙂