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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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, [...] 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 [...] We have made good progress on the Mesh Potato (MP) so far. The basic functionality (making phone calls over a Wifi Mesh network) is working OK. Over the past few weeks Elektra and I have been concentrating on several specific areas of the MP and testing them in more depth. This posts [...] Bringing up Wifi On Friday I set about testing Wifi on the two Mesh Potato prototypes. The N-type antenna connectors attach to the MP PCB via a pigtail with a tiny Hi-rose style connector. This looks a bit fragile so I decided to mount the two MPs in some weatherproof boxes so I had [...] Since the boot loader bugs have been tamed we have been making steady progress. Today I brought the FXS module drivers up, closely followed by Asterisk and the first Mesh Potato phone call at 3:43pm today. Almost exactly 1 year since the Mesh Potato project was kicked off at the first Village Telco workshop in [...] Since my previous post I have been stuck in “boot loader hell” for 3 days! On day 1 I placed the ap61.rom file and had the MP boot loader working but flash support was missing. So i took the redboot-ap61 code that Elektra had prepared and tried to flash it. Clunk – [...] The first Mesh Potato Yesterday (Monday June 1) the courier arrived with the very first Mesh Potato (MP) prototype, which had been hand assembled by the good people at Atcom. This is always an exciting and risky time in the life of any hardware project, as you don’t really know if it’s going to [...] |
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