I have my Glowforge out in my garage which is where all of my other tools are. The problem is getting a good clean WIFI signal to the garage can be a real pain in the butt. I purchased some Google router nodes to jump the signal out to the garage but was still having difficulties getting the signal to my machine.
Almost every type of router node made these days does have an RJ45 jack on the back that a network cable can be plugged into. If you want a really good connection out to your garage, you may have to run a physical network cable from inside your house to the opposite side of the wall in your garage to from one node to the next.
This is because all walls have fire blocks in them to prevent the spread of a fast moving fire. These blocks slow a fire down. Because a garage is where most people have a car and a variety of other flammable products like gasoline and such and frankly because of the sketchy things people do in their garages, these fire blocks are more numerous within the walls. The thought is that the likelihood of a fire bursting out in your home is highest within the garage.
That also means that these fire blocks tend to really jam up a good network signal. So the best thing you can do is hardwire the two nodes being used to jump through a garage wall. WIFI to the interior node, hardwire to the garage node and then WIFI to any other nodes in the garage that you see fit.
JSM
That is a good tip that I haven’t seen written up for WIFI before. We have all gotten so used to all solutions being digital that we forget to think about a hard-wired connection to “jump the gap” and make a new WIFI point. Thanks for sharing!
This is exactly how I set myself up, I actually mounted a wifi router to the outside of my house so it would reach my shed workspace with the Glowforge. I ran a nice long cat5 under the house and out, and threw an old 2.4 ghz router on the network under a separate SSID. It was essentially free since that router had been decommissioned and was sitting in a box.
3+ years later the router is just fine… it’s protected from direct rain but subject to heavy temperature swings. No issue.
I suppose the “right” way to do it is as a mesh but I don’t mind having two different wifi networks. They’re in the same subnet so I can connect across the two wireless networks (printing on the networked laser printer for example), it’s all pretty smooth.
I have the Google Mesh system. I just happen to have a window in the house that faces a window in my shed, so I set up the router in my house on the window sill, and put the point in the window sill of the shed. So basically line-of-site, window to window, so it works great!
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