Makers! We have some exciting news to share with you today. Maker’s Asylum has quietly been working tirelessly on a new project that we believe will revolutionize the way you use your mobile phones and laptops. When we were based in Mumbai, we were spoilt with the availability of three very important necessities – consistent electric supply, rock solid cell phone signals, and awesome high bandwidth internet. But if you’ve ever been to our new home village of Moira in North Goa, you’ll know how fickle all three are in our side of the woods.
To take care of our electricity woes, we invested in an awesome genset, code name SPARKY, and it has already saved the day for us several times. To improve poor cell phone coverage, we installed some funky roof top antennas and a cell phone booster, code name RADIANT, with twin add on extenders and no one has complained ever since. But one thing we constantly kept hearing was “Bugger, Buffering!”. Getting a good internet connection was a pipe dream for us. Until now.
Introducing Project STICR – the “Super Transmissive Internet Connection Re-Reflector”. This new project is a laptop/mobile phone add-on that amplifies and boosts cell phone and internet signals, so you never have to worry about weak connections again. After months of prototyping and fine tuning, using the latest tools such as KiCAD EDA and FreeCAD 3D modeller, we now have our first batch of Project STICR aka #MakeBreakCreate available, and we are giving them out for FREE (first come, first served – we did a limited batch run of 100 units only). In return, we only expect you – our trusty Guinea Pigs – to provide us constructive feedback, fawning appreciation and free coffee for 6 months. Here are some screenshots of our very first prototypes during development.
But that’s not all. We’ve embedded a coil antenna (seen in the picture above) that also acts as a Joule Thief by absorbing ambient electromagnetic radiation and charging the internal super capacitor (see schematic above), which means that it will work even during power cuts. During our intensive in-house testing program, we found that the super capacitor is able to power the device for at least about 1 hour, but YMMV.
And, it gets better! Using the companion App (free download, available on Google as well as Apple App stores) or browser add-on (available for Chrome, Safari and Bing) the STICR sticker will randomly turn on a user’s phone hotspot, so you can connect to the internet even if there is no Wi-Fi available. No one will suspect that you are leaching off a good Samaritans WiFi for free.
PS: The password will be the same as the one at our maker space – #MakeBreakCreate
Our team has been working around the clock to perfect the STICR sticker, and we’re confident that it will change the game for all of our makers. Say goodbye to frustratingly weak signals and hello to uninterrupted internet connectivity! Now available in two versions – a flexible adhesive sticker that can be stuck to your laptop or mobile phone, and a more robust PCB version which can be worn around the neck for improved free WiFi leaching while on the go.
We know that many of you have experienced issues with cell phone and internet connections in our makerspace, and we hope that Project STICR will solve these problems once and for all. We can’t wait for you to try it out and let us know what you think.
So, head over to our makerspace in Moira, North Goa, and get your hands on a STICR sticker today! Trust us, you won’t regret it. As with all of our earlier projects, this one too is open source hardware and software. So if you’d like to dig deeper into how it works, check out out project repository at this link.
PPS: Co-authored by ChatGPT !!
