Insofar as I can determine, Yes. It arrived in a factory box
with seals. I was hoping the LED's (which are concealed in
the metal enclosure of the bullet and cannot be observed
unless the case is removed) would provide insight into what was
happening. Upon removing the unit I noticed the cap. It
was co-located with the switch but I could not determine
if it was part of the reset switch circuit. Old eyes, etc.

The ends of the cap were globbed with solder. It had
all the outward appearances of a fix for a problem identified
during the production phase. Cap way to large for the pads,
manually reworked, done fast. The reset switch may or may
not have been part of the problem. It just seemed best to
address the potential given the fit. Heap in the chaos of
the laptops, plus operator ignorance and it was almost a
perfect storm.

It appears to me the concept behind the device is if it fails
out of the box, grab another and keep going, then RMA.

One other thing has me scratching the noggin at this time.
I reset the User ID and Password. However when challenged
for it by the device after resetting, the selected password
failed. Thinking I had entered a wrong password I pulled
the connection and then reinserted the cable. It  went to
the 192.168.1.1:8080 address-port combo right away but
upon attempts to log into the SETUP the password challenge
failed again. I pulled the power again and performed the
hardware password reset. Using the defaults it let me right
in. Then went through the reboot after changing the
password and once again it refused to accept the old or
new password. For the short term I just use the defaults
after another reset.

The important thing is to get it up where I have Linksys
units and determine if it is worth the effort to change
over.

I plan to post a write up of the efforts in a single post
which hopefully  will help others avoid some of the
pitfalls I seem to have discovered or created.

Thanks for all the feedback.

Chuckles

May be making some head way.

I discovered a few nights back that the wireless card was playing in the middle of the conflagration between the device and me. I kept finding a rogue IP Address despite the fact I had switched off the card with the hardware switch. Eventually what I found was the card had to be switched off, then in the network settings if it was showing "Connected"  I had to select "Disconnect". Lastly in the network settings I also had to select "Disable" for the wireless card. Oddly the rogue IP address would change randomly. That stopped once the above was performed. Whatever, dang laptops.

Went back to the device a few minutes ago and could not talk to it via telnet. Checked and the IP was present but refused to ping. <sigh> Took the device down and inspected it closely. Removed the electronics from the case and noticed there is a large surface mount cap near the reset switch which appears to be an afterthought. A close exam showed one end had a nice glob of solder but had not wet the pad so the contact was intermittent. Also noticed the reset switch was touching the edge of the metal end casting. Spent a little time adjusting the fit and now the reset switch seems easier to depress.

Hooked it all back up. ka-ching. Using the ip address and port address of 8080 it hesitated for about 10 seconds and produced a setup screen.  Will repeat and report back later.

In the ongoing saga I tried to reflash the device but the default address of 192.168.1.20 did not respond to pings nor did browsing to http://localnode:80 work.

In desperation an IP Scanner was used with the IP address 192.168.1.1 responding. The MAC address retrieved matched the device. ???????? Pinging 192.168.1.1 returned a response with response times of less then 1 millisecond. Trying to use the web browser to go to 192.168.1.1 resulted in a time out. I then tried to telnet to 192.168.1.1 and what did appear but a login prompt. I used the default user id "root" and password of "hsmm". Voila! It talked.  The screen below appeared.

So my question now is, where do I go from here if there is anyplace to go?

Chuck

I am new to Linux and struggling with it.  It is on a flash drive (Ubuntu 14.04)

1.  What should I use as a TFTP server program?  Is tftp-hpa a good choice or is there a better one?

2.  How should I set it up once it is installed?

Welcome Kelly! The more the better!

Robert (rbeau30) W5HTF/WQRT338

Joe, that's incredible! Clear over the top of LA!  98 miles on 2Ghz

Hello, I picked up 2 WRT54G-RG routers at a local hamfest, no information came with them other than they were already mesh nodes. Here are the steps I took to recover the username and password from the routers, maybe it will work for you also. I added a serial to usb converter at TTY-S0 on the router board. There are lots of information online about this so I won't repeat it here. To make a long story short, I could easily view the current username and password as well as ip addresses which would account for one of the routers not being accessible from a browser at 172.27.0.1:8080.

To recover a username/password

1. Install a serial port converter on the router
   (ttys0)(The cheap usb to ttl converters on ebay work fine for xp or win7)
2. Set your static ip 172.27.0.5 , DNS 255.255.255.0 and log in using 172.27.0.1:8080 in your browser
3. Start Putty and configure the serial port 115200baud N81
4. If all goes well, when you power it up and hit Enter,a command prompt will say something like
                               root@node :/#
If you have it wired ok, it should send startup text as soon as power is applied.

5. Enter cat /etc/htppd.conf
The response will be /cgi-bin/setup:username:password
                             /cgi-bin/ports:username:password
                             /cgi-bin/admin:username:password
6. Enter the username and password returned in step 4 into the browser to gain access to the BBHN login screen.
7.Use ifconfig to view the IP addresses incase you have a router which seems to work but cannot use a browser to access.
8. Think of me when you're a happy camper

73  va3ts.ve3tsa

http://va3ts.ca/

Is it a distance record? 98 mile link.

KE6BXT and myself completed the install of sector panel coverage this weekend. We were elated to see the Ventura County guys on Sulphur Mountain. For those of you not familiar with Southern California, this is flying over the top of Los Angles and 98 miles distance. On both ends are Rocket M2s with 120 deg sector panels at only 15dBi gain. This is ch -2 @ 10Mhz.

While the link is not stable, I did see an exchange of hostnames and a mesh status showed all the nodes on our combined mesh islands. This has been a pleasant unintended surprise! (pun intended given install is on Pleasants Pk :) ). We have confidence that we can build a solid link when we actually try.

Sulphur Mountain pics: http://www.pvarc.club/cam/?page_id=148

Pleasants Pk pics: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B2bEy75HhwWhflByWjhfOXdYMnBuSGFBYnByV0hBU2loNS1Cd25Ia0tJSXg3UFNfZ3JKaWc&usp=sharing

Joe AE6XE

Spent more time today attempting to restore connectivity to the Titanium (Ubiquiti) M2HP in possession via the LAN Port. I have reset the device several times and the unit still refuses to connect via the LAN Port. Pinging 192.168.1.20 returns the message "Destination Host Unreachable". Also the entry appearing in the wireless table on the Windows box is listed as "MESH" now which makes me believe the unit has reverted to factory defaults as it displayed another test string for the unit after loading the BBHN firmware.

I have tried differing static IP addresses on the Windows box just on the off chance something was amiss there. The SubNet Mask is set to 255.255.255.0.

Any suggestions on establishing communications with the LAN Port?

Chuck

Prices on Chinese UART GPS modules on eBay seem to keep dropping and with a stack of Linksys mesh nodes sitting here, I decided to order a handful of the GPS NEO-7M-C modules. These are TTL and can be hooked right to the WRT54G serial ports:

The serial ports on the WRT54G series of nodes are well documented on the web elsewhere:

Just remember that ttyS0 defaults to console, and unless you inhibit that in /etc/inittab, you should avoid using that serial port and stick with ttyS1.  The actual device on the Linksys nodes is /dev/tts/1.  The NEO-7M-C GPS defaults to 9600 Baud, as does the WRT54G node S1 serial port, so it's a simple matter of wiring 3.3V to VCC, GND to GND, TX to RX, and RX to TX.

Jim, K5KTF, did a nice writeup on his implementation of GPS in his node:

http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/applications-for-the-mesh/145-gps-on-a-mesh-node.html

I took a similar yet slightly different approach.  Instead of building anything into the status page, I put a separate perl script in the /www/cgi-bin directory.  This way I can remotely "ping" the current GPS coordinates of one of my nodes.  The perl script /www/cgi-bin/gps is below:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use perlfunc;

my $node = nvram_get("node");

http_header();
html_header("$node gps ping", 1);
print "<body><pre>\n";

$gpgll = `head -n 19 /dev/tts/1 | grep GPGLL`;

$latdeg = substr($gpgll,7,2);
if( substr($latdeg,0,1) eq "0" ) { $latdeg = substr($latdeg,1,1); }
$latmin = substr($gpgll,9,8);
$latdir = substr($gpgll,18,1);
$latdecdeg = $latmin/60 + $latdeg;
if( $latdir eq "S" ) { $latdecdeg = $latdecdeg * -1; }
$latitude = sprintf("%.5f", $latdecdeg);

$longdeg = substr($gpgll,20,3);
if( substr($longdeg,0,1) eq "0" ) { $longdeg = substr($longdeg,1,2); }
if( substr($longdeg,0,1) eq "0" ) { $longdeg = substr($longdeg,1,1); }
$longmin = substr($gpgll,23,8);
$longdir = substr($gpgll,32,1);
$longdecdeg = $longmin/60 + $longdeg;
if( $longdir eq "W" ) { $longdecdeg = $longdecdeg * -1; }
$longitude = sprintf("%.5f", $longdecdeg);

$gpstime = substr($gpgll,34,6);

print "$node,$latitude,$longitude,$gpstime";

print "</pre>\n";
print "</body>\n";
print "</html>\n";

So now the script is called from the web browser at http://localnode:8080/cgi-bin/gps and produces a result such as:

N2WLS-WRT-3,42.70441,-78.57855,024314

That is in the format of Nodename, Decimal Latitude, Decimal Longitude, UTC Timestamp.  This should make it relatively easy to have a website that polls the location of several different nodes and combines the data into a table or a map for instance.

Hopefully this helps someone else who wants to easily implement GPS location services on their Linksys WRT54G Broadband-Hamnet nodes.

Gary, N2WLS

wb6dco feature request.

why voice or IP.. that is very hard to do. lots of secondary equipment.

how about AM over Ghz xmtr/receiver. Just another mode for ham's to use

the wrt's with a microphone and small circuit to inject AM audio into

the MIXER line of the RF generator. and on the return recv side you put a small

pick off amplifier and ear plug.

Now you have half-duplex Ghz xmtr/receiver you can add this mode to your ham shack.

joe

wb6dco:

i want CW ability on the wrt's or the other. instead of sending TCPIP packets i want firmware

to just send two tone CW from wrt to anothe wrt. Fullduplex. so you type in AScii and get out Ghz CW. This is just another mode for the wrt boxes.

joe

Thanks Darryl

I will try another couple of things. Right now I am heading down the

route of reloading 3.0 via tftp. Will see if that works.

Chuck WD4HXG

File sharing---

Here is a link to a presentation I made to our local club awhile ago on using an Android mini PC and some apps from Google play store to setup an FTP server on a mesh node-

http://www.w8lap.com/LCARA_Mesh_Presentation_2.pdf

The FTP part starts on slide 9.

It took awhile to figure out but it works really well for sharing files.  

IM---

I just loaded the Hamchat software and I like it.  

Simple way to talk and view--

I've been thinking about the whole VOIP thing and it seems a little complicated. BUT how about just hooking up a cheap IP camera with an internal mic on each of two nodes.  It seems like a $30 Dlink 930 would do the trick.  You'd just have to have a headset at each end to avoid audio feedback.  Anyone doing voice comm this way?

The browser is doing that because it doesn't know the hostname. What IP address does your PC have (with wifi disabled)?

If you want to troubleshoot offline, shoot me an email:  my callsign at arrl.net