Welcome To Boulder Mesh

[Alex Beal]

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to the Boulder Mesh mailing list. I created this list in order to help those interested in creating a decentralized Boulder mesh network get in touch and get organized. At this point, the project is still in the very early stages, and nearly none of the details have been worked out. I'm mostly interested in experimenting with the technology, and seeing where that takes us.

Currently, here is where my head is at:

1) Understanding the software options. I've been reading about cjdns [https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/], but I'm not sure how it solves the problem of setting up the physical network. At this point, it looks like it runs on top of an existing network using a TUN interface, so an IP network still needs to be set up.

2) Understanding the hardware options. What low cost wifi routers and antennas are out there? What about homemade devices like cantennas or raspberry pi repeaters/routers?

3) What's the best way to organize the network? If a friend and I each have a wifi router, and we want to mesh our apartments together, how should we set this up? Should one run the "master" router, and the other put his router in client mode? Repeater mode?

There are a few existing projects that we could get some inspiration from:

http://hyperboria.net/
https://projectmeshnet.org/
http://www.seattlemesh.net/
http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan

As you can probably tell, other than being a software developer, I don't have any particular expertise in this area, but I am passionate about decentralized, censorship resistant, secure communications, so I'm excited to hear your ideas.

Happy meshing,
Alex Beal

[rivera.sha...@gmail.com]

I can help with the electrical components

Sean Rvera

[Alex Beal]

Excellent! Thanks for reaching out, Sean. I think most of the people on this list are software people, so your expertise is welcome! Colin is the exception, and is also interested in hardware. He proposed the solar powered repeaters idea.

I think custom hardware is probably a long ways off, but don't let that stop you from posting your ideas. I'm all ears. I know you also have experience with SDRs. There are probably some interesting opportunities there.

Alex

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[danj...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 6:56:36 PM UTC-6, Alex Beal wrote:

Hi Alex,

I dunno if this will be helpful or not but I'm in the process of designing a solar powered node. My main motivation is to be able to abandon comcast for one of the local wireless providers. I live in the foothills so reception is a problem and I have to add a wireless hop between the access device and my house. I'd also like to add a link to Solid State Depot and Ryan's cjdns stuff for the fun of it. I'm looking at 8devices carambola 2 boards running openwrt as my mesh nodes (with yagi directional antennas) and perhaps tp-link or ubiquity devices (maybe running openwrt again) for the long-haul to SSD - or perhaps the carambola 2 devices will be able to do that with the right antenna. Right now I'm working on a data monitoring and acquisition system so I can understand what kind of solar conditions I have (and will need for this thing to operate reliably all year long in varying temperature and solar conditions). If you ever want to chat, I'm almost always at SSD on Tuesday evenings.

Dan

[Nick Vanderweit]

Hi Dan,

Those 8devices boards look cool. What kind of antennas are you looking at? Do you know how feasible it would be to use wireless N? It seems like getting a decent MIMO directional antenna would be difficult, but possibly worth it in terms of throughput.

In any case, thanks a lot for your insight. You sound like a good resource on this topic.

Nick

[danj...@gmail.com]

Unfortunately I don't know much about wireless N systems. Perhaps it would be worth taking a look at commercial long-haul high-bandwidth systems just to check out their antenna configurations. I plan to use a yagi antenna with the carambola 2. I just have about a 1-2 km valley to cross with the signal so it should be fairly easy to aim. Not sure what to use for the link to SSD (probably about 10 km). People seem to like parabolic dishes better, sometimes with some sort of grounded enclosure to prevent noise from other devices. I'm just learning about this stuff myself (although I have some 2.4 GHz design experience with very low power radios).

[Alex Beal]

Hi Dan,

That sounds like a really cool project. I'm curious as to what protocol you're using. I've been looking into mesh protocols like 802.11s, but haven't done much digging in. For your setup, it sounds like you could do something like an ad-hoc network which bridges into your home network since you're doing more of a point to point rather than a mesh.

I'd love to chat some time. I'll let you know if I can make it to the tuesday SSD meeting. It would probably be pretty late (8pm maybe), as that's a busy night for me.

Happy meshing,
Alex

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