It's a great idea.  

I've heard from a fairly reliable source that Androids are sort of booby trapped to not go into ad-hoc mode.  Maybe someone has figured out a workaround.  The wifiexplorer android app seems to do it, so maybe there is a way.

I'm in WAY over my head here in terms of putting something like that together myself.

A little googling of android OLSR seems promising. 

http://www.olsr.org/?q=olsr_on_android for instance.

Funny, the screenshot images I posted above show up under Firefox both in windoze and ubuntu, but not under Internet Exploder.

There were a couple of folks out in the fleamarket at Hamcom that took my picture with the pedestrian portable mesh but I don't know who they were. Maybe they'll float up on a ham forum somewhere.  I was stopped and quizzed about mesh by a number of folks and having the WAP capability I was able to connect with my smartphone and demo the various pages on the spot.  Not much activity to see on Friday but on Saturday there were a number of nodes that showed up on the neighbor list.

I don't agree with the premise that if you're not savvy enough to operate the mesh as-is, you shouldn't be operating the mesh.  Consider the many things in our lives that have "no user serviceable parts" yet are incredibly complex.  Something as ubiquitous as a smartphone even children can operate successfully.   For most users of wifi, you connect to a visible wifi network, maybe put in a password and that's it.  I see no reason why there can't be a simple UI as a (configurable) first layer for general users, then if you need to muck with the mesh innards, those facilities are there too.  I don't think there should necessarily be a default interface, but to leave that up to the user to create an index page that makes sense for their mesh and what they need it to do.

An example I would use is the DSL router I have.  When you first log into it all you get is a splash screen with a few plainly obvious function/status icons to click on.  From there you can drill down as deep as you want.  But if all you want is to view or manipulate basic functions, you don't have to go beyond the first layer or two.

I get the port 80/8080 reasoning but I think that's the logic of a programmer/engineer and not a user.  Using port 80 should be the on-node default.  Courtesy of W9YA and the modified files he supplied I have my nodes set up for port 80.  If port 80 needs to go to an external server, it's a simple change.  I believe the use of an external server for port 80 would be the exception in most node deployments.

So in the case of my pedestrian portable node no one had to know to connect to "localnode:8080" which is a foreign concept to casual computer users, it ended up being k5lxp-32 into the browser address line, and that's it.  Much easier to recognize and use.  I know this is kind of picking nits when at this stage there are very few mesh networks in place but the easier it is to use, the more interest it will garner.  Today BBHN looks very "experimental" at this point and possibly intimidating to some who might otherwise try it.

I embarked on the mesh journey for as much an education in networking as the use of mesh itself.  I don't believe most hams would share that reasoning, but might be interested in trying a node that did a few basic functions with little user intervention.    Start with a level of basic functionality and let the user grow into it. 

Mark K5LXP

Albuquerque, NM

Well WX5U,

I am not a part of the development team either and do get this hsmm-mesh confused ALL the

time :)

Now to get serious, I was just wondering if it could be possible because I have been tinkering around

with softphone apps and software and setting up a raspberry pi with asterisk last weekend. Got asterisk

running great as far as I can tell. Even had my cheap repurposed android (no carrier) phone connected

to asterisk with a softphone app. I consider that an amazing accomplishment since I only have started

to go back to school for networking and haven't even gotten to the networking classes.

Consider this to get more users of hsmm - repurposing someones 'outdated' android phone so that they can have continuous coverage and talk as if they were on a two meter repeater? Much like

repurposing the wrt54g's. How many old androids do you have sitting around gathering dust that

could be used?

Now to figure out the five Linksys SPA's I have coming (have gotten three so far) from sales on epay

and get them configured with the four meshed routers and the raspberry pi. Still have to get the

rasp pi loaded with hsmm-pi ware so that I can have that as a stand alone. Will be testing this out

at FD this weekend for the fun and giggles of doing it. Also planning a IR camera onsite that can be

remotely controlled from a users interface.

Currently trying to talk one of the local clubs into using a hsmm link for their ancillary control of their

two meter repeater and give up the POTS line they have that costs them. Same one that I am doing

FD with this year.

James W8ISS

5 WRT54's enroute to my home here in Humble, and hope to start building up some nodes in the Humble area. Looking for contacts and possible tunnels/links across town once I start building my nodes.

Chris Engleman
KC5COF
Humble, Texas 

No, not unless you write/configure some software for your Android phone. 

You'd need to figure out how to put the Android's wifi into ad-hoc mode, which seems to be difficult to do.  Then you'd need to load OLSR and configure it to connect to broadband-hamnet.  There are probably some other steps I'm not aware of.

I am wondering if there is a way to connect an old wifi capable android phone to a node without

utilizing a regular router as a go between?

I know there 'probably' is a way to do it, I just haven't either located it or I am not fully

understanding mesh nodes that well.

Just thinking that this may be a way to entice other hams into checking out hsmm and all.

James W8ISS

A couple items to think on.

1) The use of port 8080 comes from when the nodes defaulted to NAT mode, and because NAT mode is still an option.  If the mesh node runs a server on port 80 than users would not be able to run their own server on port 80 and direct to it. This is why the web interface is on a different port.

2) Not saying we can't do better with the services page,  I will say though the thought that this will be used by someone whom needs to look for nodes that doesn't know to look at the status screen is not a good situation for an Emergency deployment.  Ideally you want individuals to be trained.  Modifying the pages on the node itself doesn't make sense in this regard since if they don't know about services they likely wont know about localnode either.

I can see the the concept of captive portal on an Access Point that might be providing a link from local users on non mesh devices into the mesh (with rules,  links to some local services etc) and can understand how that could prove to be an advantage. How that would interact and what it would do  is of course a bigger topic.   It should not run on the Mesh Node  itself it should run on the access point device (now be that a meshap or some other device is a different topic as well.) There may be some OpenWRT based firmware or similar already avalible on the web to create simple captive portal access points. I'm sure I have seen a distro or two, but can't recall off hand the names.

Mark:  Ah Ha! you must be the gentleman with the 2 node backpack.... Hey did any of us get a photo of that?  ( Doh! moment now that I think upon it )

Did you plug the mesh node's WAN port into a LAN port on your home network router? 

You won't be able to see the mesh from your home network.  You should be able to get to the mesh node status page, but not any other mesh nodes, nor any devices attached to your mesh node.  

If the IP address your home router gave to your mesh node is 192.168.0.12, you'd go to http://192.168.0.12:8080 and be able to see the status page of the mesh node itself, and that's all.

Thanks for responding, Sean & Mark. Mark, your screen shots didn't come through.

Lacking any skill with Perl, I've decided to fool around with the 'index.html' page. There's a 'refresh' meta-tag that does the redirect. By pulling that and building a static page with some links to the node's resources, I can do almost what I want. For example, a link to the node status page to go to the built in web admin system, plus a direct link to a message board (Hamchat) or IRC server on the node. These are link local, so don't require any dynamic updating. Some introductory verbage is nice as well for the uninitiated.

I'd like to see a more user-friendly advertised services page too. The automatic way the links propagate the mesh is absolutely essential to a simple, rapid deployment scenario. So I'm not going to mess with that. But a basic welcome page cueing new users on where to find links to services should be simple.  At a demo recently, just putting 'connect to localnode:8080' on a whiteboard was sufficient to get most people on the right page. From that point, using a  simple captive portal to capture call-signs or email addresses of attendees would be perfect. So far, the captive portals I've found are too complex for me to try at my current level of Linux knowledge. Plus I risk breaking the existing web services.

Onwards...

I'm with you 100%.  Rather than connect to the status via port 8080 I think there should be a more general purpose and informative HTML page maybe with some simple graphics when connecting via port 80.  It would be nice to have some user information displayed so others know what they're connecting to.  Here is my status page for the node on my tower:

Below is the status page I did for my pedistrian mobile node/WAP I had strapped to my backpack at Hamcom a couple weeks ago.

I didn't have much luck trying to serve up images when I messed around with this.  Not sure if that's a limitation of the node page generation or not. 

I think augmenting the information on the advertised services page would be useful too instead of just a static link.  Not saying the existing pages are wrong or bad, but as the mesh evolves it'd be nice to improve the user experience, so in general use we don't always have to see how the sausage is made just to use it.

Mark K5LXP

Albuquerque, NM

Well with out to much trouble I got a PC Engines WRAP 2c embedded PC that I had laying around to connect to my other node. 

Now to figure out how to move over the BBHN status page and service announcement.  The status page doesn't look to difficult, but not sure where to start on the service announcement, anybody in the know who can point me in the right direction?

Thanks

Sean, VE6SAR 

I was poking around a node today and seems if you were to look in the www directory you could edit the HTML files there to add links.

--edit If you edit /www/cgi-bin/status you can add what ever you want to the splash page. It's written in Perl so make you use the right syntax

VE6SAR

Hello,

I've not been able to find anything that will answer my question on here so far.

In the UK, the 13cm band was shared by radio amateurs and the military. However, the military has said that they no longer need the band, so it has lost most of its space. I am currently struggling to find information about it.

I'd like to know if the mesh is still usable, or whether there is not enough bandwidth to do so any more?

Are there any UK amateurs on here who can help?

Thanks,

Jack.

Hi, Eric;

I was in Fonthill last week with a mobile node, and connected to VE3PLF from various places around town. Saw another node connect at one point. I could send a screen shot if you like; would that constitute a QSL card?

Radio Mobile Online is telling me we have a shot at a viable link between Fonthill and our Hamilton repeater site. 47 Km, but nice line of sight.

I need a couple of details to help flesh that out:

 - What's the gain on your omni?

- What's the bullet's power output? I think default is 28 dBm?

I only have WRT's and Nanostations at the moment. I can test with a WRT54 and a 24 db dish, but would want something like a Rocket for a fixed link. Our site is at the corner of Upper Gage and Fennel in Hamilton, height above ground is 220 feet (or 75 m)

Your thoughts? 73