At tonight's meet/hacknight we'll be making prototypes of emergency power cables so people can power their mesh nodes in a disaster situation.
The idea is to make cheap, long, foolproof cables + instructions that make it simple to power mesh nodes from any 12 vdc source.
The thinking behind this is that the U.S. is full of cars and the most medium-term power supply in the days/weeks after a disaster will be car batteries.
A while back we ordered components for this from china and now that they've arrived we can make some cables and test how they work and whether we need better under-voltage/over-voltage protection.