It is exactly what the title is suggesting, bringing wireless to 486DX2.

Misnomer

Okay a bit of a misnomer, misdirection and small lie. I will bring wireless to my 486DX2 but it would not be an ISA card that somehow does WiFi. Although there are some wireless ISA cards out there, they do not support our current standard and definitely not our security standards.

Actual solution

The actual solution could either be an Ethernet –> WiFi bridge. I only recently learned about these and they are not numerous and easy to purchase. The ones I have seen so far either do not have a pricing or are at least €50. Also they all need an external power source and they are only good for one thing. Giving network connection. So I started looking around for other solutions.

Turns out there is a Orange Pi Zero 3. On AliExpress there was even a build kit to make it into a nice black cube with an antenna. Then for the power there exists a Molex to USB-C connector. In total this whole kit uses about 1.5W max. That is incredible to me.

So I can have a nice accessory to my old PC to make it able to have network connection via WiFi. Also it is a nice extra feature that I can easily connect to my 486 via SSH to my little cube.

Display

I had another problem, which was connecting a display to the PC. I could not easily get a CRT and even if I did, it would take up so much space. So I found a single VGA driver board with a simple added LCD screen capable of 640x480 resolution. I made a small holder board for it and when I connected it to the PSU via Molex it all worked beautifully.

This means with the added black cube I have made a portable PC of sorts. It only needs power and a keyboard and you have a full working PC with networking capability.

Fun stuff

I just thought of a simple fun thing. I was unsure of how to configure the WiFi. I think I will try to make it via UART so we can access it from the outside, but we could also make a simple interface from the inside. The 486 facing side. Since it can always give a IP via DHCP.

Then since I can type into the 486 wherever we are, I could make a simple HTTP POST call utility that will set the new SSID/password.