Nintendo Wi-Fi USB Connector

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Nintendo Wi-Fi Connector

I bought one of these because I read that it had a ralink 2570 chipset, and low-and-behold it did! The ralink chipsets are pretty well supported by completely free and open source drivers provided by ralink and the rt2x00 project. What does this mean? Well, the Nintendo Wi-Fi connector is the cheapest USB wifi adapter available today that can do almost anything under Linux (hehe, not as much for you Windows users :-) I cracked mine apart so we can see what can be done with this little device.

The Case

It's really easy to get open, just use a small screwdriver where the metal meets the plastic and go around with. The two halves are clipped together, it's like they wanted us to open it up!

Soo easy to open!

The Top of the PCB

If you look to the right of the image you can see the trace on the board that acts as the antenna with what appears to be pads to solder your own antenna in? (Too bad I don't have an extra antenna laying around.) BTW, I could have left my mac address there because the driver lets you easily change it!

Top of the PCB with RF shield
Top of the PCB without RF shield

The Bottom of the PCB

I wonder what chip is missing there?

Bottom of the PCB with RF shield
Bottom of the PCB without RF shield