[Mesh] Solar Wi-fi Repeater?

[Valent Turkovic]

I'm starting a test lab together with local high school as a project
for school kids. Plan is to compare lots of pwm and few mppt solar
chargers and different solar panels...

I have donated quite a few chargers and solar panels to local school
but if you have any device that you see on ebay and wish to add it to
this test setup you need to send it (donate it) to school in EU
(Croatia).

We will publish all results publicly.

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 3:28 AM, Max Schwartz <maxschwartziv at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok, here's what I'm thinking.  The solar repeater would be more of a
> temporary (months?) solution for people outside of the mesh's radius that
> want in.  It would be a link that mostly works during the day and sunny ones
> at that.  The people in the repeater chain would receive mesh internet for
> some period if they want a permanent solution they can contact peoplesopen
> and integrate with a home node.  If not, we can always move the repeater
> chain and try a new mesh tendril.
>
> A solar repeater would be much quicker to set up, could be done with a 2
> person team, and you wouldn't need to interact with the homeowner or go
> inside their house.  Possibly as short a setup as 30min vs 2hrs to to
> integrate a home node.
>
> Nanostation Loco M2 averages 3-4W? That's great news!  The panel probably
> needs to stay fixed at the 20W size, anything larger than that seems too
> expensive and cumbersome to carry and mount without additional hardware.
>
> Definitely need remote voltage and current monitoring Valent, good call.
> Are we sure that MPPT is the way to go over PWM?  Cost reasons number 1, but
> I was worried that the additional micro-controller would eat the power that
> was gained in increased efficiency for a low power application like this.
>
> Jenny, I'm putting 2 of these together as a proof of concept, if the mesh
> wants to cover expenses I won't say no :)
>
> On Mon, Apr 2, 2018 at 11:58 AM, Valent Turkovic <valent at otvorenamreza.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> Max consider also adding INA219 voltage and current monitor. You can
>> connect it via i2c bus to most OpenWrt devices, or add additional ESP8266
>> that will use INA219 chip to monitor current and voltage.
>> If you don't have some kind of remote monitoring you will regret it later,
>> I talk from experience :)
>>
>> Also using Grafana is great for this, you can see one of our latest
>> setups:
>> https://imgur.com/a/Z9qhk
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Valent.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Max Schwartz
> maxschwartziv at gmail.com
> 314-578-4503