I am interested in this. Do you guys have a website or a way to contact you?

Thanks,

Will

Welcome to the group. 

In case you don't already know it, the WRT54G-TM requires a different process to load software.

Look here.

The Chinese communists are coming out with some really impressive radios.  Some of them had some learning problems in how to sell to the US market, but they're learning fast, and most of the blunders weren't that bad in terms of reliability.

It took me a while to wrap my mind around what you're doing there.   That's an interesting configuration, but it does make sense after I think about it for a while.

I'm a little surprised the mesh gateway box fixed your problem. 

Glad you got it working.

I just finished updating my nodes to Version 1.0.0. Everything went smooth. I had one issue, where I could not log in with the old password. I just followed the instructions for a fail-safe login and reset the password. Everything is working great!

Planning to have the node set up for use at the "Tall Ships" Festival August 16-18 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. We'll have an IP camera streaming video and set up logging for the special event station on Saturday!

Hi Ho all... I'm Seannon, KD4IYI, I ran into another ham at work recently, and was reminded I need to get back on air, he showed me the Bao Feng dual band HT on ebay, and I was all O_O Wha? Dual Band HT for $40 DELIVERED!??? so, since I can't afford right now to get even that, and he pointed me here, AND I have a spare WRT54G-TM hanging out doing nothing... I at least can get started here ;)

Seannon KD4IYI (Kick Dog 4 Ignoring Your Inlaws)

Update: Node KD4IYI-1 is up and running on a Linksys WRT54G-TM that has the additional heatsink mods for the radio section, and processor. 

Update 2: Node is now on the map, with coordinates, and should have one of the BaoFeng HT's in a week or two ;)

Hi Red, I'm Seannon, KD4IYI... I ran across another Ham at work, and I have been pretty inactive for the last decade, and it's time for me to start stuff back up again, according to the map position for your node, you are EASILY the closest to me, I live between the Lamplight Village and Scofield Ridge subdivisions (on Widge Dr) pretty much E-SE from you I may be trying to get my spare router set up for the Mesh, I can definitely isolate it from the rest of my network and access it via a server or ACL but as I am renting... I won't really be able to put up a tower... can we extend the mesh via a VPN link? I'm just starting to poke around the tech part... my email is seannon (at ) gmail.com I am on that chat service too...

Just a brief note to tell everyone that I successfully flashed a Buffalo WBR-G54 last night.  It has the same specs as a WRT-54GL, with 16MB RAM and 4MB of Flash, so it used that.  It had already been flashed from factory to DD-WRT years ago, so it seemed like a great candidate, and I was not mistaken.

73 de Jeff KC2SDS

I came across a few Dataradio Gemini G3-700 radios, they are in the 700mhz band - but I was wondering if anyone had any knowledge of them.  I know it's not really a mesh related question, I was more curious about them then anything else. Was thinking they might be good for something if they were able to have the frequency changed in them. I don't know, do they need some type of server or can they talk peer to peer (need two of the radios)? Like I said I am more curious about them then anything else, and figured that someone here might have worked with them before or know something.

Here is a link to a pdf I found about them. I think it talks about the UHF and 800mhz models, but what I found are 700mhz

http://www.calamp.com/assets/ds_gemini_uhf.pdf

thanks,

LeRoy, KD8BXP

Hello,

  I just got my first BBHN Node (WRT54GS v2.1) the other day.  I've got it all set-up and ready to go.  I'm thinking about taking it on a road-trip up and around Providence.  Has anyone in the Providence area upgraded their firmwares to v1.0.0?

 My home QTH is in Preston, CT [FN41an].  So far only one other station in CT is on BBHN and he is all the way down in New Haven.

--73 de Doug (N1OBU)

What device is running UI-webserver?

A PC into my home LAN called 192.168.1.10

Is this device plugged into a non-mesh home router?

Yes, it is.

Does the WAN port of IZ5FSA-001 plug into the LAN port on your home router?

NO! LAN port of IZ5FSA-001 plug into the LAN port of my home router with static IP and no gateway assigned.

Is the "mesh gateway" box checked on the setup page of IZ5FSA-001?

NO!!! That's the real "Columbus Egg"!!!

Checked the mesh gateway box and rebooted... and my home UI-webserver works fine behind IZ5FSA-002 mesh node!!!!!!

You can see attachments for final configuration: it will help someone in the future!

Next step will be to find a new WRT54GL and act it as a mesh AP... and figure out how it works!

Many, many thanx WX5U

--

73 de Leo IZ5FSA

Attachments
 mesh4.png [250 KB] :: final result - it works!
 mesh3.png [7 KB] :: IZ5FSA-002 mesh status
 mesh2.png [13 KB] :: IZ5FSA-001 port routing config
 mesh1.png [20 KB] :: IZ5FSA-001 basic config

Having done this on numerous machines I would HIGHLY recommend using the olsrd.conf file from the /tmp directory of a V1.0.0 WRT54G's and use it for the config file on your Ubuntu system.  While most of it is comments this file does cause a number of OLSR plugins to be loaded at startup.  You may have to download and install each plugin (usually libraries or .so files for Linux) mention in the file.

A couple of things you'll hafta edit in the olsr config file:

1. Change the line 'MainIP yer_ip_addr'  to use the machines WiFi IP address.
2. Near the end of the file there's a line 'Interface "wl0" -- change to use the name of the Wifi network interface you're using for the mesh; usually wlan0  & keep the double quotes!
3. Check each file that's mentioned in the config file.  If you're porting to an embedded Linux system then most of these files you will want to put into a RAM-based filesystem instead of FLASH-based. This will keep the FLASH memory from getting wore out because these files tend to be re-written fairly often.
4. Make sure that the secure plugin config is COMPLETELY commented out or removed *IF* you are using v1.0.0.

And put this file away in the place that your version of 'olsrd' expects it to be placed, usually the /etc/olsrd directory but sometimes in /etc.

I think you'll find that Ubuntu will mesh a little nicer with these modifications.

What device is running UI-webserver?  Is this device plugged into a non-mesh home router?

Does the WAN port of IZ5FSA-001 plug into the LAN port on your home router?  

Is the "mesh gateway" box checked on the setup page of IZ5FSA-001?

FWIW, if it means anything... even if it were possible to disable the SSID broadcasts on the mesh (and keep the mesh working), each node has short script that runs every 5-minutes that transmits a UDP broadcast with the node's hostname on port 4919.  See /usr/local/bin/fccid which is run by cron.

I'm currently banging my head against the wall getting OLSRd on Ubuntu to register itself via nameservice (including service advertisements).  Once that's hammered out, connecting anything to the mesh is basically:

1) Associate to BroadbandHamnet-v1 on channel 1, Ad-hoc mode.

2) Assign a static IP in the 10.x.x.x space. If you want, use the last 3 bytes of your NIC's ethernet address to do this like mesh nodes do, otherwise, any arbitrarily picked IP address will probably be fine in all but the largest of meshes.

3) Get OLSRd up and running. Completely unconfigured, olsrd -i <interface> will work and get your routing tables synchronized, and will allow you to extend the mesh with whatever hardware you're using.

Once OLSRd is properly configured, your machine name will show up on the mesh (versus just an IP address), as well as any services you wish advertised (e.g. a file share or something for others to use). Note: this is where I've run into problems, and would appreciate help. 

4) Get your own DNS synchronized with OLSR. This should be pretty straight-forward, especially on Ubuntu or Debian where NetworkManager runs a local dnsmasq instance similar to how the BBHN firmware does it. 

5) Make certain that your callsign is periodically beaconed. You can do a broadcast ping that includes the hex representation of your machine's name. You could put this in cron to run every 5 or 10 minutes:

ping -c 1 -p `echo $HOSTNAME | xxd -p` 255.255.255.255

It looks like this when it runs. KD0NRC-Laptop is 0x4b44304e52432d4c6170746f70 in hex.

PATTERN: 0x4b44304e52432d4c6170746f70
PING 255.255.255.255 (255.255.255.255): 56 data bytes
--- output truncated. multiple machines return ping ---

You can clearly see my callsign in the traffic. This is similar to how the mesh nodes do it, but a little different method. Sniffed with tcpdump, the traffic looks like this:

$ sudo tcpdump -nvXs 1514 -i en0 "icmp"
tcpdump: listening on en0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 1514 bytes
15:45:29.222720 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 49845, offset 0, flags [none], proto ICMP (1), length 84)
    192.168.42.102 > 255.255.255.255: ICMP echo request, id 61984, seq 0, length 64
	0x0000:  4500 0054 c2b5 0000 4001 cce5 c0a8 2a66  E..T....@.....*f
	0x0010:  ffff ffff 0800 b9d2 f220 0000 5204 0369  ............R..i
	0x0020:  0003 65a1 4b44 304e 5243 2d4c 6170 746f  ..e.KD0NRC-Lapto
	0x0030:  700a 4b44 304e 5243 2d4c 6170 746f 700a  p.KD0NRC-Laptop.
	0x0040:  4b44 304e 5243 2d4c 6170 746f 700a 4b44  KD0NRC-Laptop.KD
	0x0050:  304e 5243                                0NRC

Once you have all that figured out, actually browsing and utilizing the mesh becomes the only problem. If configured properly, olsrd_Nameservices will create files (on the mesh nodes, you can look at them: /var/run/services_olsr and /var/run/hosts_olsr), so you could either manually look at the files, or create a web script similar to the cgi-bin scripts on the mesh nodes to render them into something useful.

I tried to put the documentation in here, but it looks like crap so I emailed it to you instead.

If anyone else is interested, just drop me a mail at: sm7i.ham@gmail.com

73sss SM7I

I don't know if the 3G card would work, but I REALLY doubt it will work.  I think the Broadband-Hamnet™ prepackaged images are pretty much one software image for the Broadcom router and associated hardware with some packaging to make it pass checksums on the different versions of vendor firmware. The 3G hardware is probably going to require some firmware that will be wiped out if you load BBHN on the WRT54g3g.

That also brings up another concern.  If you don't have a .bin image for the original firmware, you won't be able to restore your router to factory condition if you try to flash BBHN to it.   We know where the firmware is for the "mundane" WRT54G models, but you may not find it for the weird models.  Plan ahead if you want to be able to back out. 

I think the same router models were available for HSMM-MESH as for BBHN. 

All I know about model compatibility is what's listed on the firmware download page, and the supported hardware list. 

I don't think there are a lot of installations on hardware other than WRT54G, GL, and GS models.

Be sure you understand and make clear the difference between:

1) Running Broadband-Hamnet™ on a new piece of hardware.

2) Configuring a device to the point that it's able to connect to a BBHN network.

I get the impression that installing OLSR and some extra configuration will theoretically allow many devices to connect to a BBHN mesh. 

Simply being able to connect is good, but there's a lot more to the BBHN system than that, especially in terms of ease of use.

I don't know the details to answer your original question.