I was thinking about how to make the experience of operating a node really
smooth and engaging, and I thought: What if there was a big button right on
top of the node that you could press and the node would tell help you
troubleshoot?
*press*
<node> I am connected to one other mesh node via my dish antenna on the
roof. I am connected to the Internet via the Internet connection in this
home. I count four clients currently connected to the mesh through me.
--- another home ---
*press*
<node> I am not connected to the mesh. I am not connected to the Internet
but I remember being connected to the Internet only four hours ago. Please
check that a cable is connected to my port labeled "Internet" and that the
other end of the cable is plugged into one of the ports labeled LAN on your
Internet router.
I checked prices on aliexpress and I predict that it would cost about $4
per node plus some work to do this:
Components:
* USB Sound card $1.25 -
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/USB-Sound-Card-7-1-Channel-3D-Audio-Sound-Ca…
* Amplifier: $1.21 -
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/1-PCS-Mini-Digital-For-Audio-Amplifier-Board…
* Speaker with case: $0.96 -
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/3-5mm-Audio-Portable-Wired-Multimedia-Speake…
* Button (ok not very big, but best I could find cheap): $0.30 -
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/10pcs-Push-Button-with-Cap-12x12-mm/19150748…
or instead of the speaker and amp, just cut one of these in half and
super-glue it to the top of the node:
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mini-Portable-Hamburger-Speaker-Amplifier-Fo…
For the My Net N600 there's likely a secondary unused USB inside of it
where we can solder the sound card and tap power for the amplifier.
I know this is kinda silly. We probably don't want to be doing this to a
whole bunch of routers, but if we ever do a large enough custom order of
mesh routers (e.g. crowdfunded) it might be cool to add this feature + if
we show it off as something we're working on it could gain us some
attention.
For now I might make a prototype at some point.
For software I'd go with pre-recorded messages that are combined as needed,
since it will sounds _much_ nicer than speech synthesis. You can do 10
minutes of very nice sounding human voice in about 800 kB, so i think we
could fit enough voice samples on there without running out of storage.
fiverr.com is a good source for really inexpensive high quality voice
acting talent.
--
marc/juul