[Mesh] Wifi gear

[Marc Juul]

On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 9:41 PM, Jeremy Entwistle <
jeremy.w.entwistle at gmail.com> wrote:

> Maybe somebody can clear this up, but what does supported hardware mean? I
> was expanding our walkthrough this weekend by trying to build my own
> openWRT image with Buildroot. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought
> we mainly needed openWRT with the appropriate drivers in the image. If not,
> then what else? (IPsec for tunneldigger, etc.)
>

We have to choose which routers to officially recommend/sell and provide
support information for. We won't prevent anyone from trying to use
whatever they have lying around.

Modern OpenWRT needs 32 mb of ram to run well, so that's where that
requirement comes from. The requirement for flash size will likely be 8 mb,
just because it's a pain to deal with 4 mb and because updates are quicker
and easier with the jffs2 filesystem (which doesn't compress as well as
squashfs). We could decide to support 4 mb flash later on if it seems worth
the effort. The requirement of having an Atheros chipset is based on the
fact that Linux has pretty good drivers for those chipsets. That may be
true for other chipsets, but I haven't investigated this in detail.

As I get deeper into mesh technology, I'm becoming less and less interested
in supporting many devices and repurposing old hardware. I feel like mesh
technology is still at a really early stage, and that much better
technology is needed before we get closer to reliable, easy to deploy and
maintain, high speed mesh networks. This is one of the reasons I'm working
on an SDR-based mesh. As it stands, the single-wifi-radio devices we have
available are not great at mesh. Trying to support older, slower and
crappier devices does not seem worth our time given the relatively low cost
of higher quality hardware.


> Pete brought a router that wasn't on the supported hardware list because
> it had been a revised router. It was a D-Link 601 B1 and he had a custom
> built openWRT image he found on the internet. A lot of my interest with the
> project is people being able to repurpose their routers, either
> automatically with software, or manually through a comprehensive guide.
> Ideally middle school/high school kids should be able to convert their
> routers.
>
> In other words, if you plan on not keeping these routers around, I would
> rather use them to test firmware builds. Sorry Pete, I don't want to brick
> your router. :P Also, I'm interested in expanding the walkthrough more at
> this week's hack night if anybody is interested.
>




> Jeremy
>
> On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 12:00 PM, <mesh-request at lists.sudoroom.org> wrote:
>
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>> Today's Topics:
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>>    1. Re: Wi-Fi gear (mark burdett)
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>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2013 22:27:54 -0800
>> From: mark burdett <mfburdett at gmail.com>
>> To: "mesh at lists.sudoroom.org" <mesh at lists.sudoroom.org>
>> Subject: Re: [Mesh] Wi-Fi gear
>> Message-ID:
>>         <CALd=3MJ-6ANdtzm8=
>> gZiMo5-0YQQrCMr8uip2bxd6Bc+Rp+m2A at mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>>
>> Ok I looked up OpenWRT compatibility. I will start trying to find homes
>> for
>> this stuff, but let me know if it's useful.
>>
>> 1 ? Asus RT-N53
>> >
>> Don't think it supports OpenWRT
>>
>> > 1 ? Belkin N450 DB
>> >
>> Don't think it supports OpenWRT
>>
>> > 1 ? Linksys WRT54GL
>> >
>> Supports OpenWRT but maybe not worth keeping around?
>>
>> > 1 ? Linksys WRT54GL v1.1
>> >
>> Supports OpenWRT but maybe not worth keeping around?
>>
>> > 1 ? Linksys WRT300N v1
>> >
>> Supports OpenWRT
>>
>> > 1 ? Netgear WNDR3300
>> >
>> Supports OpenWRT
>>
>> > 5 ? Netgear WNDR4000
>> >
>> Supports OpenWRT
>>
>> > 1 ? Netgear WG311v3 (PCI card)
>> >
>> N/A it's a PCI card :)
>>
>> --mark
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