I’m lazy so I’ll copy the email I sent to friends about the status of my Free WiFi project.
Hi guys,
I thought I’d start sending out updates via email for now until I get the motivation to blog them. Eventually I’d like to have a wiki of sorts for community wifi projects and the like.
Anyhoo:
I’ve got Second Cup on 104th up and running.
I switched the domain to http://free-wifi.ca and I redesigned the site to allow for better ads. Any ads you see are fake. Don, wanna give me $75/month!?
I also turned on the captive portal which makes users authenticate their session before they can continue. I did this because it forces a redirect to free-wifi.ca while the previous redirect option wasn’t always working.
The last updates from firmware version 952 to 953 bricked most of the network until I could reset them, however from 953 to 955 they were fine. This is good because 953 and 955 were supposed to address a lot of hangup issues the nodes have. I hope manual resets aren’t going to be the demise of the project.
I spoke to Jonathan Plesset in Pittsburgh on the phone last week. He’s a neat guy, sounds like he’s young and one of “us” He hates municipal wifi projects (sorry Don) and he runs a hotel down there and has 100+ nodes in the hotel and then 31 nodes on his street. It’s an area called Shady Side which is very similar to Whyte Avenue. Something like he has running is my short/long-term goal. Check out his site (http://www.shadysidewifi.com/) and then the Meraki (he hates them btw) map. http://public.meraki.com/network/shadysidewireless He runs like 50GB a WEEK through TWO gateways! Some of the nodes are 8 hopes away too. It’s crazy, I hope it’s something we can accomplish.
Stephen has taken several nodes and placed them at ThinkTel and a few other locations. Mack, would you like some? I think you’d be the best person to go talk to the Three Bananas Cafe.
I would like to have a big pow wow for everyone interested or involved in this project. As most of you know I’ll be out of the country for 4 months come September and it’s too long to just drop this thing. I was hoping to do this in early August. Friday the 1st even. We could meet at my cafe depending on how large the group is, or heck Three Bananas would work (right Mack?). Anyone have suggestions or problems with August 1st?
If you know anyone who wants to be included in future updates please have them contact me.
If you have any questions or ideas please let me know.
Open-Mesh.com is slowly but surely improving. Just recently I noticed their homepage changed slogans. It went from something like “WiFi for the developing world” to “WiFi Where You Need It”. I like the latter, myself.
New firmware updates have also happened and beta 1.21 has been released. There was a glitch upgrading to the c953 firmware because of the technique used to upgrade. This required a lot of people to manually reset their routers if they were using the test firmware. They fixed the problem by using the “normal” way to upgrade and version c955 went off without a hitch.
According to Antonio Anselmi, author of the ROBIN mesh network software which powers Open-Mesh, says that the latest kernel is about a week away. Yay!
This weekend at BarCampEdmonton1 I set up a temporary WiFi network using my Open-Mesh routers. Things went relatively smoothly after I unplugged 2 of my repeaters. For some reason plugging in 1 gateway and 5 repeaters at the exact same time wouldn’t let some of the repeaters update with new SSIDs. In the end I used 2 gateways and 2 repeaters.
At one point over 40 people were using the WiFi at the same time. The network saw a total of 71 users throughout the day.
I’m looking forward to the better firmware that Open-Mesh is developing on a daily basis. Eventually I’d like to see these things as simple as plug-and-play without having to worry about them checking in.
BarCampEdmonton was a great success this weekend. There were over 100 people in attendance and it was great to meet new people and learn about new projects and interests.
A picture of the schedule is here:
I went to
Financing an Idea
What Problem Does The Semantic Web Solve?
Angel Fund, U of A, Robert
Evolution of Nexopia
Why Twitter Will Rule The World
Emerging Mobile Platforms
I also led a session on Edmonton Wireless & WiFi Mesh Networks with Mack Male.
One of the most interesting conversations I had was with a fellow named Clark Murray. Clark and three other guys have created a great product called dub5 which stands for the 5 W’s in everyone’s life, the Who What Where When and Why. Essentially dub5 is a new take on scheduling and calendar management. Their major advantage over competitors like Outlook and Google Calendar is their text message integration. Personally I love this and I hope to be using it as soon as it’s ready.
Since all the video I took of my sessions ended up being like 300mb a piece and 20 minutes long I haven’t finished uploading them to Google Video yet. However, check out the quick demo I had the dub5 guys give me.
He hates municipal wifi projects (sorry Don) and he runs a hotel down there and has 100+ nodes in the hotel and then 31 nodes on his street. It’s an area called Shady Side which is very similar to Whyte Avenue. Something like he has running is my short/long-term goal. Check out his site (http://www.shadysidewifi.com/) and then the Meraki (he hates them btw) map. http://public.meraki.com/network/shadysidewireless He runs like 50GB a WEEK through TWO gateways! Some of the nodes are 8 hopes away too. It’s crazy, I hope it’s something we can accomplish.
