Re: [Mesh] Hardware for Study

Hi there folks, After years of learning a bunch of stuff off of mailing lists I've started working on using them. I want the messages I send to last and be referred to later on, so here's a random reply in a mailing list. For cheap hardware there are many great opportunities with end-of-life'd enteprise stuff. Brands like Meraki and Aruba require a license to run, which often means that large lots of hardware suddenly become useless to the original purchaser and are sold for less than a penny on the original dollar. When you combine this with the fact that a lot of ath10k and ath11k hardware has usability issues, the advantages of sticking with slightly older hardware become obvious. I have been stockpiling lots of Meraki MR16, MR18 and MR24. Was able to purchase about 250 MR16 for about $700, and trivial quantities of the latter for about $6 and $10 apiece for testing. All hardware has gigabit PoE (active or passive); the MR16 has 2x2 an and 2x2 bgn (AR9220, AR9223); the MR18 has 2 x 2x2 abgn (AR9582) and one 2x2 bgn out of the SoC, and the MR24 has 3x3 an and 3x3 bgn -- notably using mini PCIe slots rather than integrating them into the board, see board images here: http://en.techinfodepot.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Cisco_Meraki_MR24 My suspicion is that the MR24's PCIe slots can be used with pretty much any mini PCIe cards (as long as they don't require the USB-side of the slot). This means we can stick, for example, Compex WLE900VX in them -- 3x3 abgn/ac cards with decent power and laughable affordability ($20/pc in single quantities). These run ath10k and are known to be OK to run in VHT-IBSS - after all the Archer C7 uses these. Flashing with OpenWrt is doable for all of these regardless of firmware revision; riptidewave93 has done most of the work porting these to OpenWrt. They have serial headers already on them, so for the MR16 you just pop it open and plug in and power it up (I wrote a script to automate it here: https://github.com/btvmeshnet/hardware/tree/master/platforms/Meraki/MR16/fl…) -- for the others you have to rebuild uBoot and reflash using a flash clip ... but my point really is, these routers can be obtained in bulk, have PoE so they can go anywhere, and have ath9k-based hardware so "just work with mesh no matter how you want to use them". Here's a lighting talk as done by Yurko of Tomesh: https://ournetworks.ca/livestream/?m3u8=live-2019-09-22.m3u8&from=QmWyL… I have a modification for the MR16 so that they can use external antennas - it's quite simple, just drill two holes for U.FL-to-RP-SMA pigtails in the two bottom corners and then screw in two pigtails from the inside. The internal U.FL connectors are attached to both the 2.4 and 5GHz chains (this is why the internal radios cannot be used on the same frequency). At that point, you just attach two external dual-band antennas (or whatever else you want to stick on them). I am happy to write up much more complete guides for all of these things (I encourage EVERYONE to link whatever they write up into techinfodepot, as it is where many people who get into hardware go and learn). I am happy to flash and box up and ship 10 x MR16 + 5 x gigabit PoE injectors + 1 x USB-to-TTL cable if you folks can make use of them. I am happy to send folks TTL cables for free if they need them (you can also do this work with any Raspberry Pi). Quite frankly, to put them all to good use I would be happy spending all of my free time buying, modifying and shipping these out in exchange for my parts and labor cost (probably $8-$10 per MR16); my goal is to erase all barriers to reusing this hardware, as it is cheaper than dirt, tougher than nails, and is PoE-capable out of the box. I also see many more opportunities out there - like RTL8812AU (see aircrack-ng's repository for the driver) for very-high-throughput-point-to-point at low cost. I really would like to improve community knowledge of hardware so that those who have the most time and the least funds can gain and share knowledge of these things, which should (in theory) continue to improve access to hardware for everyone (because there are more interesting problems to solve than hardware). Sorry if this email is exhaustive. I don't see any good single place to collaborate on this so I'm doing a bit of a thought dump. Would be very happy if I found a good way to link together communities better as it took me years to do all this info discovery (did not know Sudoroom had a mesh mailing list until now). For hardware information in general I have been hoping to have consolidation, but since wikidevi.com has come down and is being migrated to techinfodepot, the new place for hardware info is here: http://en.techinfodepot.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page Let me know if you can use the box of Merakis; happy to send at no cost if I have a destination. - Martin Kennedy