-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 11/04/2013 07:23 PM, james dee wrote: Not all builds of Android can put their wireless chipsets into ad-hoc mode. On some of the drivers we'd reversed, the code which actually tickles those bits isn't even there - it seems to have been commented out prior to compilation. I would also strongly recommend that everyone read the following ticket in the Android bug tracker: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82 Long story short, our contacts at Google stopped talking to us and they locked comments on the ticket ("Only users with Commit permission may comment.") They are certainly useful as PDA's, assuming that wireless is accessible in that location. Something to keep in mind is that the older a phone gets, the more fragile the silicon gets. Running a mobile in wi-fi mode 24x7 is going to put a hurt on it. That's how I killed mine last summer. You could probably get by with a slightly cheaper solar panel (like the cellphone charger kits sold at HOPE last summer in the hacker village). A good question. I know of an antenna which would be a good place to start. However, if you are going to go the dish route, it will by definition narrow the beam to trade off for distance. It would work for a point-to-point link, but it will make communication with clients problematic because they will have to be positioned within the beam to pick up the transmission reliably. An optimal configuration is one per building, we found. That seems to give decent enough coverage in environments where there are obstacles that attenuate the signal and cause blank spots. If you want to link nodes that are far apart and have second interfaces for clients, dishes or yagis work. If you want clients to connect to your node, you want either an omni or something to reflect signal away from the big flat surface the node is near toward the clients. Pick the antenna for the use case, and accept trade-offs to get the job done. For small areas, you do not want lots of nodes. That is what killed the OLPC as a viable mesh network platform - every OLPC was both a client and a mesh node, and the network overhead crushed the wireless network. You want one, maybe two decent mesh nodes at most with clean signals. Also, pick a channel that is lightly trafficked, because neighboring wireless access points will interfere with a mesh that uses the same wi-fi frequency everybody else and their backup is using. - -- The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS] Developer, Project Byzantium: http://project-byzantium.org/ PGP: 0x807B17C1 / 7960 1CDC 85C9 0B63 8D9F DD89 3BD8 FF2B 807B 17C1 WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ "Where there is love, there is life, and where there is life there is hope." --The Cruxshadows