Monday, April 28, 2014

FoxFi and PDAnet HotSpot Hardware Hack Idea for Android 4.4 KitKat

So you got the latest Android Phone, put FoxFi or PDAnet on it, and started using your free wireless hotspot with ease.  It was perfect, right?  You then heard about the latest and greatest version of Android called KitKat and couldn't wait to get it installed on your phone.  In your haste, you didn't realize that people were finding out that their FoxFi/PDAnet hotspots were no longer working on KitKat.  Once KitKat was installed, you found this out the hard way with a message that read like this:

"Your carrier has blocked wifi mode in latest phone update.  Please use USB mode or Bluetooth mode instead."

Total bummer.  You joined with all those other Android users now on KitKat who now are blocked from creating hotspots, and wept.

And as of yet there is no word on whether or not the FoxFi/PDAnet people will be able to find a way around this lockdown.  But, what if there was a way to do it with a simple piece of hardware?

The idea is this.  PDAnet allows you to tether to your computer using USB or Bluetooth.  On the computer installed application, there is an option called "Wifi Share" that allows your computer to share the USB/Bluetooth tether using your computer as a wifi router.

PDAnet (or someone adventurous) should create a small device that works in a similar way as a computer being tethered to the phone, but is small enough to be carried in around with the phone in your pocket.  This device could have a small wifi NIC in it as well as a low profile linux OS on it to run PDAnet.  Once the device is connected to the USB port on the phone, the PDAnet app could detect this and set up the wifi NIC to create a wifi network through the USB tether.  They could also make this happen with a Bluetooth device as well.  It would be great to see these devices be capable of attaching to the phone in a way that they would be easy to carry around for usage anytime.

This would work in a similar way to the ISIS iPhone Case that gets around the fact that iPhones don't support NFC.  The case itself has an NFC chip and connects to the phone using bluetooth.

What do you think?  Are you a techie or a hacker with the skills to do this or the time to throw something together and try to make this happen?  Post a comment or share your work.  Let's see if we can create a nice solution to the problem of FoxFi being locked down on KitKat.

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