The network switch that I used to use in order to couple the two LAN cables in my room together decided to burn up its processor and die. Because of that I was streaming my weekly Hytale streams via WiFi, which especially with a new bug where CEF for the OBS browser source uses a bunch of unecessary CPU resources caused immense problems. Not only can I not use the 1000Mbit/s upload speed that I pay for at all, due to the WiFi being so bad after going 3m through one room and wooden floor that I only get a few Kbit/s. No, it also often intermittendly completely stopped streaming, which on Twitch immediately means stream end and not just lag like on YouTube. Several times during the previous stream it stopped, causing the VOD on Twitch to be broken up into a multitude of pieces, some of which only seconds to minutes long.
Because the switch is dead anyways (the processor became hot enough to discolour the solder mask on the underside of the PCB), I decided to completely take it apart and just use the raw network ports from it along with some bodge wires as an RJ45 female-to-female cable. Gesagt, getan, the switch was disassembled and I started soldering away. Sadly my equipment is quite lacking for stuff like this, so I had to resort to violence. The PCB ended up in thousands of shards all over the room and several of the RJ45 ports broke in the process of removal, but I managed to separate enough of them in working condition that I could bodge two of them together for their new purpose. I made sure to not leave too much exposed metal on the wires, in order to make shorts less likely. And here it is:
Outcome
The little adapter that I made may look a little sketchy, but it does work very reliably. And not only that, but despite the wires I used never being intended to carry high-speed data, I can push ~830Mbit/s through them in a speed test, much better than the measly ~13Mbit/s that my WiFi usually manages for upload (though that figure is not measured, only guesstimated). And during and after yesterday's stream it became clear just how much better than my WiFi this little adapter really is, because the stream ran stablly, now only bottlenecked by my CPU that was constantly choking on OBS's browser source. And after the stream it became even clearer, in a way that surprized even me: instead of the usual 1+h that it takes for the VOD to upload to YouTube, it took barely a minute this time around.
Little side note: I also managed to get my camera sharing to show up on Kylo's and Corbent's stream this time, but that was likely an issue in UngoogledChromium that Firefox did not have, instead of a networking issue, based on the fact that it behaved the exact same over the new and improved connection as it did over the terrible WiFi.