Tag: modding

D-Link DIR-615 Modding

Posted October 15th, 2014

Hello everyone, today we’ll take a very quick look at a hardware mod I did a little while back on an old D-Link DIR-615.

This was initially an experiment in building a wireless repeater network to span some more of my workplace, so I wanted to fit large, high gain antennae. The DIR-615 seems an odd choice then, given it has fixed, non-removable antennae and is fairly famous for dodgy wireless performance out-the-box.

But I haven’t lost all my marbles because it also supports DD-WRT, the open source router firmware that gives you a worrying amount of control. Coupled with the fact that I was able to buy two DIR-615‘s for under £10, I think we have a winner!

Upgrading an Xbox 360 hard drive, the cheapskate way

Posted April 26th, 2013

I bought my Xbox 360 just after Christmas 2006, £300 for the console with two wireless controllers, Project Gotham 3 and the first Gears of War.

Since then it’s been custom painted, it’s red ringed and taken a holiday to Frankfurt where it was repaired over Christmas 2009, lived with me in five different houses, and generally been run in to the ground; but although all the internals were replaced with the RRoD repair in 2009, the hard drive was still the original 20Gb unit it arrived with.

Until the last couple of years this hasn’t been a problem, but now it’s annoying. Halo 4 for example, requires you to install the second disc to the drive before you can play anything – that’s 4Gb gone right there. Throw in a few map packs and a lot of accumulated game saves, and suddenly space is at a premium. Not only that, new hard drives are also at a premium – depending where you look, a new drive at the top end of the available sizes (250/320gb) can be £70!

But of course, you never need to do things the “official” way. Within that drive enclosure is actually a standard 2.5″ SATA drive, and besides a little bit of software tinkering you basically just need to swap it for a larger drive…

In the newer style 360 it’s even easier since the native SATA connections are exposed inside the HDD slot, so you can literally take a 2.5″ drive and (carefully) plug it in to the slot. I knew this was possible having read about it at some point long ago, so “why not”, I thought.