[Mesh] This Week in Mesh!

[Mitar]

Hi!

I would just add one more thing:

While I believe firmware is good to iterate, I would strongly argue
against reinventing the node database system. Those we really have too
many already. :-) In all possible programming languages. Especially
because it takes much more time to develop a feature-full system.


Mitar

> On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 4:21 PM, Charles N Wyble <charles at thefnf.org> wrote:
> 
>> Oh no. Not another firmware project. Please work with qmp or libremesh or
>> villagetelco.
>>
> 
> I find this statement odd. In my opinion it doesn't make sense for
> different mesh projects to share a firmware project. These "firmwares" are
> all just OpenWRT with extra packages pre-installed and a bit of
> mesh-specific default configuration... sometimes some custom web gui stuff.
> Most of this will vary based on what the mesh project is trying to achieve.
> 
> New work in the form of additional features for OpenWRT should be put into
> OpenWRT or released in the form of OpenWRT packages. Useful configuration
> files and web guis can be shared, but will likely need to be adapted by the
> different groups
> 
> Let's have a look at these projects anyway:
> 
>   qmp does not support all of the devices we are using. It uses bmx6 which
> as far as I can tell is based on the now-abandoned batmand, and so runs in
> userland (ah!) and is layer 3. On top of that bmx6 it seems to have a
> worryingly small amount of documentation. qmp has a few tools that may be
> interesting, like a node map, but then again all mesh groups seem to have
> their own node map and little helper tools.
> 
>   libre-mesh.org is giving me a 502 bad gateway and archive.org does not
> have a copy of the site. Looking at the git repo it seems to consist of a
> few make files, a bit of addition to the openwrt web gui and a bit of
> configuration. It oddly installs both bmx6 _and_ batman-adv on all routers
> (we have lots of 4mb flash routers. space is an issue).
> 
>   villagetelco seems to be a for profit company (?). They support only
> their own hardware and two models of tp-link. It bundles SIP stuff and its
> goals seem to be very different from ours.
> 
> I'm sure someone who just wants an easy to deploy mesh solution and doesn't
> care too much about the specifics of the firmware could be happy with these
> solutions, but given our goals, basing our firmware on either of these
> projects would likely set us back more than it would help.
> 
> In my opinion, the correct solution for building a mesh firmware is to
> begin by identifying what the needs of the mesh project are, identify what
> functionality the firmware must have in order to best fulfill those needs,
> then find the best tools from OpenWRT or other mesh projects for the
> required functionality and finally combine them into a custom firmware.
> 
> 
> 
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