We have now a new over-voltage protection circuit design for the mass production Mesh-Potatos. We were not satisfied with the previous version. Ideally the over-voltage protection circuit has a snap-on characteristic that triggers the fuse and interrupts the supply voltage without a grey zone. The new circuit triggers at 43 Volts and acts as a [...]
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Today we made some phone calls over a 400m link using PCB antennas. We want to use etched PCB Wifi antennas for the Mesh Potato. However we have heard that some companies have had problems with PCB antennas, such as variable results in production. So before committing to PCB antenna we wanted to do [...] Joel is helping my Village Telco presentation at the upcoming LCA 2010 conference so I took a couple of the first Beta MP01s down to his place for a test drive. They are fresh off the production line and not even calibrated as I needed them in a hurry for LCA 2010. Atcom [...] Jeff and I have just had an enjoyable day outside testing candidate antennas for the Mesh Potato. Our goal was to evaluate candidates for the internal antenna of the production Mesh Potato. Jeff designed three types of antennas which I laid out on PCB and had fabricated locally. The three designs were a dipole, [...] I’m currently performing “Africanisation” tests on Mesh-Potato prototypes from the alpha and beta production run. “Africanisation” means that a Mesh Potato is supposed to survive even if you accidentally feed reversed DC polarity or AC to the DC jack, to any pin of the Ethernet port or FXS port. For a couple of weeks [...] Current firmware images for the Mesh-Potato now feature the LUCI 0.8.8 administration web interface. The LUCI project, mainly driven by developers from the Freifunk communities in Leipzig and Halle, has developed a web interface for embedded devices that are running the Openwrt Kamikaze firmware. LuCI was founded in March 2008 as “FFLuCI” (Freifunk LUA Configuration [...] I just made some test phone calls between two Mesh Potatoes 800m apart. Quite a nice result as both MPs were using just their little 12cm omni whip antennas. One MP (a V1.1) was placed on a mast on the roof of my house. The other MP (a V1.2) was “portable” – strapped [...] This post discusses the factors that affect the quality of Village Telco phone calls, in particular under marginal conditions like heavy mesh load and self-interference. This information was gathered from VOIP over Mesh papers (e.g. [1]) and discussion threads on the Village Telco Google Group in October and November 2009. Each node in the Village [...] Since the 2nd Village Telco Workshop in July we have been working on the Beta release of the Mesh Potatoes. Progress slowed immediately after the workshop – I think we all needed a break and some time to organise the resources (e.g. test equipment, prototype manufacture and people) required for the next phase of [...] It is just a little over a year since the first Village Telco workshop in June 2008 and having recently completed second Village Telco workshop from the 20th to the 24th of July, it has taken a little longer than I expected to get this post out about the event. Similar to the first [...] |
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