Well, I thought I posted a question...
but now that I can't find it anywhere, here's the answer..
I busted open the ABS. The power and Ethernet feeds are on very
small seperate PCB's from the main boards. As you know, they
sit side by side. I'm happy.
I've removed the power-in jack, and made a new PCB that accepts
the power over pins 4+5 and 7+8 of the ethernet jack. I kept
apple's opto-isolator on the Ethernet socket, and also kept the
barrier diode, as well as the various capacitors and resistors
on these two board assemblies.
(For sanity, I actually bought new components for these, to save
unsoldering and resoldering small surface mount components)
While I was at it, I now have an external antenna connector on a
new board, with the relevant pigtail connected to the orinoco
silver card, in place of the old power jack, so no holes in the
case anywhere. All the original apple cards are still intact, so
I can send the whole lot back if ever I have to.
I have also toyed around with the whole sub-assembly.
I think it would be possible to install an orinoco gold card and
then tell the ABS it can do 128bit WEP, there are some suspicious
pcb-track solder jumpers on the board, which I believe may hold the
key. Not going to try that just yet.
On the other end, a simple power injector is used. I reused an
old 3com one, hooked up to the apple power supply, but it would be
simple to follow instructions such as
http://www.nycwireless.net/poe/
No holes in the ABS, no power problems with 100ft of cat5e.
Go boldly forward into the land of no cables....
Cheers,
Ben.
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