Asus S56 WiFi Card Upgrade

This post is a mental note on how I upgraded my laptop's wireless card from an Atheros card to a fancy Intel 7260 AC WiFi adapter. For all of $30 too!

Intel 7260 @ Canada Computers:
http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=27_1048_1050&item_id=062806

Really helpful tear down instructions:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/698655-asus-s56ca-wh31-15-6-ultrabook-teardown-integrated-ssd-hack-os-install-hack.html

Intel 7260 drivers (Windows 8 was able to find these automatically):
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=23942
These drivers are the latest as of this writing.

Notes and maybe instructions on upgrading the WiFi card in an Asus K55A should be up soon too!

EV3ToC

The Lego Mindstroms software is an awesome way for anyone to get into programming and robotics. Lego has made it very easy to build a robot out of Lego, write a program by connecting program blocks together, and then watch your robot come alive! Within (at most) a couple hours anyone can have a Lego robot driving around, doing whatever they tell it to do. This is really amazing, especially for kids who already play with Lego.  Robot competitions (Like the Ottawa Robotics Competition http://www.orc.ieeeottawa.ca/home/) are now open to kids that are as old as Facebook is and can program better than some computer science undergrads. This is all thanks to Lego Mindstorms, but what if you want to dig deeper and really see what’s going on under the hood of a lego Mindstorms brick. Well, unfortunately, you can’t – at least not easily. The hardware itself can be explored and researched but you can’t do much with the software. A program that’s written using the Lego Mindstorms IDE, in all of its blocky glory, can’t be easily converted to an actual program in a real program language. This led me to begin a project called EV3ToC, a program that will convert a program written for a Lego Mindstorms EV3 to functioning C code.

Why in the world would you want to do that?