A bug in the maps software we are using (nodeshot) is causing all nodes to show up as active. It is annoying. The map is currently used to let people add their locations if they want to adopt a node. I am sorry if the map has mislead you into believing that we have many active nodes. I made a quick fix to the nodeshot code so it displays correctly now.

We are currently hard at work on the firmware and associated software. We want to deploy nodes as fast as possible, but we also want to ensure that they'll stay up over time, and that we can update the software without physical access if a bug appears. The two active nodes have already helped us find problems that would have been very problematic for a larger mesh, as they crashed after a few weeks of uptime and were not rebooted by the hardware watchdog. It seems that the newest OpenWRT is not able to run stably on the lower-memory routers. We have yet to find the problem with the watchdog.

The current critical TODO items for the firmware before we deploy to the 31 nodes on the map are:

  Simplified router admin interface.

  Remote status and software update.

  Automated building of firmware.

We have people actively working on these but extra help will get us there faster :)

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Marc Juul