[Mesh] Solar Wi-fi Repeater?

[G Gallo]

Super awesome proposal Max, I'm happy to help facilitate the development of
these prototypes as involves People's Open. I can help make sure the
sudowrt firmware works with whatever antennas you end up settling on (I
have a Nanostation Loco M2 I've been meaning to test).

Also something that may be of interest to you is the Mikrotik Wireless
Wire, https://mikrotik.com/product/wireless_wire

They are supposed to be very easy to setup, come in pairs, are relatively
cheap ($200 for a pair). While they are meant for short throws (~100m LOS)
and operate in the 60GHz spectrum, they do provide a full duplex gigabit
wireless link. Might be something to consider depending on how you plan on
deploying these repeaters. I've been meaning to order a few to see how
People's Open could use them.

-grant

On Mon, Apr 2, 2018 at 6:28 PM, 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 <(314)%20578-4503>
>
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>
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