[Mesh] Wifi gear

Thu Dec 5 04:16:27 PST 2013

Hi!

> I have serious doubts that some these families will want,  or be able
> to afford, a new router.

New routers are $20. And if this is too high, we can try to fundraise
for equipment and then donate equipment.

> And I think madwifi supports broadcom, but not all chips support
> mesh.

No, madwifi does not support broadcom. madwifi is old anyway. WRT54GL
uses binary blobs and support only 2.4 kernel (no Batman, no IPv4), only
G protocol. Open source b43 driver to my knowledge is very unstable.

Mitar

> The traditional saying is buy a ten dollar radio and a hundred dollar
> antenna. But we haven't really focused on that philosophy because low cost
> has been a priority.
> 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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>>
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