A Raspberry Pi Stands In for an Out-of-Stock LAN Adapter in This Starlink Installation
With the official LAN adapter on backorder, this Starlink installation turns to a Raspberry Pi to serve as a Wi-Fi to Ethernet bridge.
SpaceX's Starlink is proving popular enough for the hardware to be in short supply — which is why one subscriber has turned to a Raspberry Pi as a temporary replacement for the out-of-stock gateway.
Designed to offer high-speed low-latency satellite broadband connectivity, Starlink has a long wait list — and those who are lucky enough to receive the antenna hardware are finding that the wired network adapter is on backorder. Pseudonymous maker "RulesOfImgur" is one such subscriber, and has turned to a familiar device to bridge the gap.
"The house has too much tree cover for Dishy [McFlatface, the Starlink ground station hardware] so I had to put it on the only clearing on the property. V2 is Wi-Fi only, v1 has Ethernet. They sell a LAN adapter for $20," RulesOfImgur explains. "So I'm using fiber optic cable because it's about 100 meters away (330ft)."
The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, housed in a waterproof box, connects to the Starlink hardware via Wi-Fi and acts as a bridge to a wired Ethernet network on a fiber-optic back-haul.
"The [Raspberry] Pi seems to give anywhere between 30-100 megabit with ping of 20-40ms," RulesOfImgur adds. "Can't tell if that's because of the Pi limiting it or just the internet coverage. [The dish] has obstructed visibility because its ideal location at our place is a construction site. Due to the obstructions I can 'expect interruptions every 6 minutes.'"
More details on the project are available in RulesOfImgur's Reddit thread.