My wired ethernet triumph was in my current rental. There's an old under-floor evaporative air-conditioning ducted system which is no longer used. I bought a $40 remote control car with large rubber wheels and a low CoG, strapped a GoPro and a head torch to it so I could stream video to a phone, and tied on a piece of string. The mission was to get from my study to the kitchen which is about 10m all up.
It was more of a challenge than expected. The ducting had ramps, multiple corners, debris/rubbish, and a mouse skeleton to navigate around. All of this wasn't helped by the terrible latency and needing to move the phone to different places to reduce distance and attenuation through the floor. I got stuck quite a few times but could always use the string to pull back a bit when I got wedged on a rock. Sometimes I just needed to gun it to get over an obstacle.
In the end, the car and ethernet cable were cheaper than a good wireless card or POE kit, and I got to give away the car to a kid.
> It was more of a challenge than expected. The ducting had ramps, multiple corners, debris/rubbish, and a mouse skeleton to navigate around.
My uncle worked for a company that designed and installed commercial ductwork. The joke he liked to tell while they were going in: "Make sure Bruce Willis can get around in there."
I visited an old Victorian National Trust house in the UK where the owner had used his rabbit-hunting ferrets to help install electric wiring under the floors rather than rip up the expensive wooden floors and panelling
Ferrets were often used to drag cables to the right place. It is apparently an urban myth that Boeing did this in jet manufacture, but they were used in other similar contexts.
I mean, he was running a string under the floor connected to the RC car. He could probably have piped the video (and maybe power) over a thin enough wire to go completely wired.
It was more of a challenge than expected. The ducting had ramps, multiple corners, debris/rubbish, and a mouse skeleton to navigate around. All of this wasn't helped by the terrible latency and needing to move the phone to different places to reduce distance and attenuation through the floor. I got stuck quite a few times but could always use the string to pull back a bit when I got wedged on a rock. Sometimes I just needed to gun it to get over an obstacle.
In the end, the car and ethernet cable were cheaper than a good wireless card or POE kit, and I got to give away the car to a kid.