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Yesterday I was a guest of the Serval team on an exciting field deployment in the Northern Flinders Ranges. It was a very busy day, starting at 4:30am and flying out at first light from Adelaide 700km north to Arkaroola in a delightful Pilatus PC12. Pilatus PC12 at Aldinga Airport Flying to Arkaroola One hour and [...] One of the challenges in making the Mesh Potato as dead simple to use as possible is the fact that, unlike many modern Internet devices, it has no GUI. Sure, you can plug a laptop into the ethernet port or connect via WiFi to a web interface but the Mesh Potato on its own has no [...] Paul Gardner-Stephen had one of his MP01s “brick up” when attempting a GUI-based reflash and was having problems recovering. So I offered to take a look at it for him. Reflashing and recovery can be intimidating the first time around so I thought a short blog post might be useful to explain the steps I took [...] We’re getting closer and closer to full production of the Mesh Potato. Below you see the 1.3 version of the Mesh Potato motherboard that integrates the FXS module onto the PCB and also includes an integrated antenna on the PCB as opposed to the external antenna for the first Mesh Potato prototypes. We chose [...] 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 powerful [...] I have just returned from LCA 2010 where I presented on the Village Telco and manned a Village Telco booth on the Open Day. Very good response and lots of people would like Mesh Potatoes! Check out my LCA 2010 blog post for more. Mesh Potatoes at the LCA 2010 [...] 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 some [...] 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 are [...] Following the release of A2Billing 1.4.4 stable the 14th of December, we have released the Simplified Management Interface for the release. The Installation Wizard and the Simplified Management Interface and part of a larger effort to simplify pre-paid billing for the Village Telco. Code for the simplified wizard to be applied over the current A2Billing Administration GUI [...] 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, a [...] |
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