So the Raspberry Pi sometimes doesn’t have the juice needed to
run power-hungry USB dongles. The most common issue is with WiFi
adapters. The solution has long been to use a powered USB hub,
but [Mike Worth] didn’t want to take up that much extra space.
The solution he worked out injects power directly into the
dongle itself. The red and white wires coming out of the side
provide the 5V source. This is coming from the same USB mains
power adapter that supplies the RPi board itself. To connect the
wires to the dongle he made an adapter out of some strip board
and the shielding from the dongle. The end of the strip board
pokes out of the shielding far enough for him to solder on some
wire, which is then soldered to the traces on the dongle’s PCB.
You can just plug this in and get down to business. But while he
was at it [Mike] added an improvised antenna for better
reception. It’s the same type of hack we saw him use for a
Bluetooth dongle in this links post.