[MLB-WIRELESS] Meraki news

[Simon Knight]

Hi,

I think it would be well worth organising a co-ordinated group and
mailing list for the mesh efforts in Australia.
Most of the work to date has been in Germany/Austria, and the
documentation is alles auf Deutsch...

There are a lot of similarities between what you guys in Melbourne, us
in Adelaide (Air-Stream via safreenet.org), and the guys in Darwin
(the-mesh.org) are wanting to do.

It would be good to pool our efforts together.
Some of the initial RD projects we should consider would be:
- getting OpenWRT/OLSRd up and running on the Meraki mini units
- finding a couple of appropriate omni antennas for the Meraki units
- working out a low cost weatherproof/outdoor mounting solution
- making up a pcb design for the PoE injector that we can mass produce easily
- Adding in the captive portal interface, and allowing customisable
local content (key for local business interest)
- testing the setups in the field.

For the meantime I've setup a Google Groups list at
http://groups.google.com/group/ausmesh/

We have a lot of experience in many fields out in the wireless community.

Cheers
Simon

On 3/3/07, Dan Flett <conhoolio at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Guys,
>
> I'm in Adelaide at the moment and went to an Air-stream meeting the other
> day.  They've got a nice network here and are very proactive about getting
> sponsorship, sites for nodes, and developing new software.
>
> Simon Knight from Adelaide tells me that the Meraki Beta program is almost
> over.  The good news is that the post-beta retail price will not rise.  So
> the Indoor Meraki Mini should be US$49 and the Outdoor unit US$99.  They
> seem the best device we've seen so far for doing what we want to do - wether
> you prefer mesh or point-to-point links.  OpenWRT support is experimental at
> the moment though.  Personally, I'd like to buy lots of these - maybe a few
> at a time, load the Melbourne Wireless Freifunk firmware onto them (once we
> can make it work on the Meraki) with the MWHotspot package, and just leave
> them at friend's houses. :)
>
> I also think we could consider using them as wireless advertising boards.
> With the explosion of Centrino laptops and other WiFi-enabled devices, lots
> of people (non-geeks) log on to open APs now and try to leech Internet
> access.  We could approach businesses with a live demonstration of how a
> Meraki can be used to include their advertisement on our captive portal
> page.  Those businesses may be more keen to allow us to put wireless
> hardware on their site if they get something tangible in return.
>
> The Atheros radios in the Merakis have good virtual SSID support, so they
> can run in multiple modes at the same time.  For instance, they could run in
> Adhoc mode with the SSID melbournewireless.org.au for the mesh uplink, and
> in AP mode with the SSID of "Insert Business Name Here".  Anyone who logs on
> to either SSID would get our Captive Portal page.
>
> Just some thoughts... :)
>
> Dan
>
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