I had a chance to connect my node to a small mesh network during the YRARC Hamfest in Markham, ON. It was exciting. However, I realized that the biggest issue with mesh network is at the application level. We got connected and now what ? Can I pick up the mic and start talking ? VOIP is great but I thought that having some simple way of communicating right after connecting would be extremely useful.

What I came up with is a simple chat server that can run on the router itself and does not require any special client software except the regular web browser. So far I tested it with IE 6, 7 and firefox 13. Feel free to give it a try. Your feedback is always welcome.

Nikolai

Attachments
 hamchat.zip [8 KB]

Works Great Easy to set up very small foot print. Time stamp would be nice.

73 Bob n7wwk

For a quick and dirty time stamp I change line 157 in the hamchat.pl file to the following:

printf FILE '<p><span class="callsign">' . $name . ':</span><span class="date">' . localtime() . ':</span><span class="message">'. special_chars($msg) . '</span></p>' . "\r\n";

I then added the following to the styles.css file to make the time stamp slightly smaller and a different color:

.date {

padding-left: 2px;

padding-right: 5px;

font-family: "arrial-narrow", arial, sans-serif;

font-size: 14px;

color: #FF00FF;

}

If your router is connected to the internet it will pick up utc time while booting, if not, it will be some random time.  If the correct time is important you will need to ssh into the router and change it manually as there is no way to do it from the web interface. The command is: date MMddhhmmyyyy (Month, day, hour, minute, year)

This is how the time stamp will appear in the chat server as well:

K1NDT: Sun Jan 27 09:06:11 2013: testing

Hope this helps.

This worked well on Safari on my Mac as well as IE9 on a windows 7 machine.

Many thanks to VE3NKL for this.

Scott K1NDT 

For some reason Quick Reply always fails with Request Forbidden, sigh.

Hamchat is a really important event in the life of HSMM-Mesh- especially when trying to demo the value-added potential.

Two apps that would be uniquely suited to the bandwidth and resilience of HSMM-Mesh:

1. Image transfer (single images good, streaming video a bonus).

2. 2-Way streaming audio (for SSB rig operation - linked to a control app like flrig)

Thanks!

If you use Rusty's IRCD pckage and IRC chat, you can send files and photos through it's interface. And it fits on any version hardware.

Im trying to figure out good duplex audio myself, as I now have TWO USB nodes, each with a USB sound card attached ($3.50 for both slo-boat-from-china specials). I would like to be able to tx/rx audio from my 897, since I can control it via ser2net and HRD over serial/USB.  Just need the audio solution.

73

KTF

I agree, having audio application sounds like the next natural step. I did some research on what could be used here and my first choice was looking at ECHOLINK. Imaging that we have a local ECHOLINK directory server on one of the routers. In this case every PC connected to the mesh network could run an ECHOLINK client the same way it is done on the actual global ECHOLINK network.

Unfortunately, their server software is not open-source as well as the protocol they use is not published. There was an old ECHOLINK linux-based client (which I tried on the actual ECHOLINK system with a great success): QTEL. You can google for SVXLINK for more information on it. I wrote a small function-limited directory server that supports a small subset of the ECHOLINK directory protocol, enough for QTEL to communicate with it. The server is written in LUA (I could not get it done in micro-pearl). LUA can be installed on the router without any problems, it has a fairly small footprint. When the server is running on the router QTEL clients could connect to it and see all who is currently connected. Then you can initiate a two-way audio connection with any of the connected clients.

Note that the server is not necessary as as far as I remember you could use an IP address of the target client directly. However, the server makes it much more convenient to use. Unfortunately, it does not support more sophisticated clients like ECHOLINK for windows, etc.

May be we can start a new thread on this if anyone has interest in it and some good ideas.

73, Nikolai

VE3NKL

If you look under Applications, I did it.

Basically, I used ser2net on the node, Perle TruePort on a Windoze box (serial to IP driver), then tell Ham Radio Deluxe to use that serial port.

For Audio, I basically built a phone patch with an ATA adapter on it at the rig, tied to my Asterisk system, for the audio. I call that extension and it auto-answers and voila... full duplex audio.

HRD has a TX button, so I could TX/ RX, control the rig completely, and have voice.

73!

KTF

I just wanted to say thanks for the awesome chat room! (and to others who donated additional info for this app.) I am trying encourage others to make a mesh in my area and this provides a quick high value addition to spur interest.

Jim

Thanks for the reply Jim and Rusty. I finally figured it out after some additional hacking. The room option is cool also, maybe a future alteration.