State of the Mesh

Brimstone and I(strages), have been working on an 802.11 (wifi) mesh at Makers Local since 2011.  It’s been a long learning experience as both of us started with zero knowledge of how to build a wifi mesh.  Brimstone has since moved to Atlanta but continued to work with me remotely.  He’s been doing all the work on custom openwrt firmware images for the project and a fair amount of independent testing.  I’ve been doing a lot of the research and how to physically put together a self-powered unit for use in disaster areas to bring up a communication infrastructure.  I’m proud to announce that with the help of Crashcart we have our first self-powered mesh node prototype! I’ll be conducting tests in the next few weeks to ensure there’s enough solar to keep the node charged indefinitely. We’re finally on our way back to focusing on the Emergent Network Field Day event that started this whole journey.

Current features include:

• auto discovery of other nodes

 

• separate AP network to allow non-mesh devices (including smartphones!) to join the network

 

• captive portal to inform users about the network and links to resources on the network

 

• internal wiki accessible from the mesh

 

full DHCP and DNS services