Updated final photos - Using an Airport Express to isolate my 100mbs ethernet devices

[Ralphael]

I’ve been playing around with Apple’s homekit where you add light switches and smartplugs that are controlled by your iPhone. I’ve also added a security alarm and wifi cameras to my home. Both uses a little white box that connects to the network at, old fashion, 100 ethernet speeds. Yes, when connected, it takes down my unmanaged Dlink Switch and converts my gigabit lines down to an old fashion 10/100 ethernet network. Yes I know that it doesn’t happen to your network, but it does to mine and I’m annoyed.

Luckily with a little internet research I found that an Airport Express can isolate these 100mbs devices to their own little network. Although a DLink Wi-fi range Extender could do the same by extending your wifi network and allowing you to plug an ethernet device into the ethernet port, the Apple Airport Express offers the same feature as an Access point but instead of one ethernet port it offers two ports.

I have no clue on how to set this up. After several resets because I kept messing up the configuration of my Airport Express, I decided to leave the ethernet cable off to see if it could detect my home wifi network by itself and was hoping that since it was an Apple product that it might come back on to tell me that it is all set up. Many of my smart plugs uses my iPhone to detect and configure them so I decided to check my iphone to see if it could find the Airport Express and there at the bottom of my iPhone screen, I see the Airport Expres; boy was I surprised. I tapped the Airport Express bar which took me through a bunch of configuration screens to extend my existing Wifi network to this unit. After entering the password, the network name, more passwords and suddenly my airport was setup as a standalone Access point unit.

Here you can see the two base unit, the lutron bridge on the left and the skylinkhome alarm hub on the right. The Apple Airport Express at the top that acts as the Access point with the two devices connected via ethernet. This is all standalone and can be moved to my front door without any cables except three power outlets.

[ERmorel]

Hi,

Thanks for sharing your experiences with that device. Hope this helps other users.

[Ralphael]

I thought I would follow up with the after photos of my installation.

This is the foyer of my apartment and as you can see, the bookshelf is completely self-contained with the alarm peeking out at the top of the bookshelf; there is no ethernet cables.

Yes the alarm is a cheap alarm, more for belting out 110 decibel of sound as a warning. Pull the plug and the alarm goes quiet, however hopefully by then it would have sent me a notification to my iPhone, plus the camera above would have taken a few snapshots.

A very simple solution with an Airport Express using a WiFi Bridge, providing two wired ethernet connection.

Here is the lutron bridge module hiding behind the books.

Now that we have move everything off the old shelves where the clouds are, we only need one cat 5e ethernet cable running to the Airport Extreme of which the two clouds are then connected to 2 of the 3 available gigabit ethernet ports.

It is extremely clean and organized. The gigabit network stays gigabit and my AC WiFi gets me an average of 40MB/s write with an average of 23MB/s reads; totally adequate for simple desktop chores.