It seems the older I get, the density of damaged and/or old laptops on my garage grows. That’s one of the reasons it’s fascinating to understand which jobs are being made to restore to life these things. [zigzagjoe] sent us an fascinating job he constructed out of a Lenovo yoga 2 motherboard: a pfsense router/firewall.
The laptop was damaged, however the primary board was working just fine. What started as adding an old Pentium heatsink to it as well as see exactly how great it would work, escalated to a completely working, WiFi, 4 port gigabyte NIC, 3D printed situation firewall. The board had PCI-E via an M.2 A/E key slot for the WiFi module however [zigzagjoe] requirement a typical PCI-E slot to link the quad-port NIC. He decided to hand solder the M.2 A/E (WiFi card) to have a PCI-E 1x breakout since his searches for an adapter came out empty or as well expensive. For storage, he selected 16GB SanDisk U100 Server half-slim SSD for its power efficiency. when again, the SSD cable had to be hacked as the laptop originally utilized a super-slim HDD with a non-standard connector. The enclosure was then designed as well as 3D printed.
But [zigzagjoe] went further to enhance his brand new router/firewall. On the job documentation, we can see a great deal of different adjustments went into building it, such as bios adjustment for new WiFi modules to work, an Attiny85 fan driver for additional cooling, a 45W PSU inside the situation as well as other fascinating hacks.
This is not your typical laptop to firewall hack, that’s for sure.