WiFi Menorah For Eight Nights Of Bandwidth
A few weeks ago, I was just shooting the shit with some friends, and I had this idea to make a menorah1 that has antennas instead of candles. Thinking a bit more, I realized that the enterprise version of the WiFi Pineapple2 has 8 antennas.
The idea was now to make a menorah with 8 of the 9 candles be antennas and have it be able to provide an antenna stand for one of those pineapples. So I got to designing.
Designs
My 3D CAD software of choice is OnShape. While I don't like using cloud/web hosted tools, it is free and very good for most of my uses. Almost all of the 3D CAD designs are done on OnShape.
Version 1
The first versions of designs for me are usually a little... jank. It's the initial stage where I play around with the shapes and dimensions and see how it comes out. So for this version, I just wanted to make a base, the stems, and hollowed tubes so I can fit the cables through. It came out looking like so:
I didn't even bother printing this one. Another thing to keep in mind while designing is to think about how the thing will actually be manufactured. You can have different features and shapes depending on how you plan on making the physical part. For 3D printing, which I plan on doing for this project, I can have tubes and overhangs, as long as the overhang is not too steep, or in a place where supports can be removed easily.
It's also meaningful to think about which orientation the part will be printed. If I printed that menorah standing upright, as you see in the render, the base will be printed just fine, and the vertical parts of the tube will be as well (but it might be weak to snap since it's printed layer by layer upwards). But the parts that are sideways will have lots of supports, print artifacts that may reduce the quality of the print (and maybe not perfectly to designed size). Additionally, since it is tall, it will take forever to print. I just now tried slicing it on PrusaSlicer, and it just barely fits my print bed and will take about 9 HOURS to print, 16 hours with supports.
So, onto the next version
Version 2
For version 2, I actually got some of the parts so I have an idea of how big/small/wide things should be. I also went for a simple design, something easier to print: rectangular stems/tubes instead of round, and straight, angled, branches instead of round, curved.
To make printing and assembly easier, things were also separated into parts.
Tips
First, the antenna tips.
The tips are meant to hold the SMA connectors shown below. The hole above will fit the main "barrel" part, and the hexagonal space through the body should hold the bottom of the connector.
The flat bottom of the tips would sit on top of each of the stem branches.
Stem
The tubes were made narrower. They are also rectangular, which should make it easier to print on its side. The tips match the inner size of the bottom of the tips. Simple.
Base
The base provides... a base... for the rest of the menorah to stand on. It's also got a few mounting holes. The main hole on top goes all the way through the part for the cables to go through, but there are also holes on the side, if you want the cables to come out the sides instead of all the way through to the bottom.
I printed the parts and assembled them.
Re-printed in gold filament and cables crimped.
Version 3
The V2 stem was a little too tight to fit all 8 cables through. Gotta make it a bit wider.
Additionally, there is a connector base that can screw onto the bottom of the normal base and mount the other ends of the cable SMA connector. The hole was sized large enough to fit 1 or two of the SMA connectors, so that if desired, the part can be taken apart after being fully assembled.
With that, the final version render:
The stem was too big when printed on it's side, so it was split in half right down the middle and glued together after cables were fed through.
The cables were crimped on the bottom and secured.
Now it is functional and can be hooked up to the WiFi Pineapple, although I don't have one... I say it is functional, but it's probably definitely not the best arrangement of WiFI antennas. So... I can't guarantee any performance gains.
The WiFi Menorah now happily sits on my friend's table:
Anyways, chag sameach!
73
-B
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A menorah is a nine-branched candelabrum lit during the eight-day Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. You would often see this lit up around the holidays around town. ↩
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The WiFi Pineapple is a portable wireless network auditing device, developed by the company Hak5, used by cybersecurity professionals for penetration testing (pentesting) and by malicious actors for hacking. It acts as a rogue access point to perform man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. Product page ↩