I have an Android phone which can share its G3 IP connection with my laptop via the provided USB cable. That works fine: the phone notices when the USB cable is plugged into the laptop (presumably because pin 1 is detected at +5vDC), and it will therefore charge while sharing the Internet connection.
I also have a WiFlyer pocket AP with an RJ45 socket for the WAN connection. I'd like to use the phone to provision the AP with its Internet connection (it will request DHCP, which the phone will provide).
Note that this is the exact opposite way round from the many fine conversion cables available which have an RJ45 SOCKET and a USB PLUG, and which are intended to provide an Ethernet signal _from_ the RJ45 connected to a source, _to_ a device which has only a USB socket.
Is there someone who can build me a small box which will provide a voltage on pin 1 of a USB socket sufficient for the phone to notice, and therefore to offer to share the connection; and to convert the signal from pins 2 and 3 of the USB connection to the relevant pins on an RJ45 plug that I can plug into the AP? The box could have a lead with a USB
*PLUG* which could go into an adjacent socket on the laptop, or even a battery-powered USB charger, in order to source its voltage. It could of course also be powered from its own batteries, or from a suitable charger.There are USB-female to RJ45 male plug converters on the market, but these are clearly no use as they provide no voltage to the USB side, and without this, I don't think the phone will notice that the USB cable has been plugged into something. I imagine these converter blocks are actually aimed at the USB-to-serial-that-uses-an-RJ45 connector, not Ethernet signal handling. It might even be possible to modify one of these to do the job if a suitable voltage feed could be attached; but I don't know enough about Ethernet to know if the connections from a USB feed can simply be spliced to the two data pairs of an RJ45.
///Peter