News

Experimenting with the Microduino MicroWRT Core

06/11/2015

Some weeks ago, Jason from Microduin o ™ kindly sent us three samples of the MicroWRT Core boards and asked us to give them a try and use them with qMp. We added the support for these devices in the recent qMp 3.2 Clearance stable release and played with them a little bit to build a small mesh with sensors.

The MicroWRT is a small and cheap development board based on the MediaTek MT7620A SoC (which integrates Ethernet networking and 2.4 GHz WiFi 2T2R), with 64 MB of RAM and 16 MB of flash storage. It is fully supported by the currently latest OpenWrt 15.05 Chaos Calmer release and, since recently, by the qMp 3.2 Clearance stable release.

The MicroWRT boards have a great performance and the SoC is well supported by qMp/OpenWrt. The devices are a great option to build a wireless mesh network that integrates sensors and actuators, thanks to their expansion board that allows integrating Microduino (Arduino-compatible) boards.

We have detailed the process of building a small mesh network with three of these devices, adding the Microduino board with a sensor and sharing the information all over the mesh network in the following two articles:

Experimenting with the Microduino MicroWRT (I)
Experimenting with the Microduino MicroWRT (II)

According to Jason from Microduino, the devices will be available for purchase in a few weeks.

Categories Networks, Development, Research

qMp 3.2 Clearance

The new stable qMp release has been published - 21/10/2015

qMp 3.2 Clearance stable release has been published. This release comes after the previous 3rd release candidate from which a number of bugs have been fixed and support for new devices has been added. It is recommended to use this version to deploy new Mesh networks and to upgrade nodes running previous releases that might be outdated.

Before upgrading to this release from older versions, make a backup of all your configuration files in the /etc directory. You can use the command line tool "qmpcontrol upgrade" to automate the upgrade process.

Changes since the previous release (3.2-rc3):

Based on OpenWrt 15.05 Chaos Calmer
Using latest BMX6 stable version
Added support for Microduino MicroWrt devices
A few bugs solved (see below)

Changes since the previous release (3.2-rc2):

Based on OpenWrt 15.05-rc3 Chaos Calmer
Using latest BMX6 stable version
Proper declaration of VLANs for BMX6 in /etc/network/interfaces (backported from Kalimotxo/QinQ)
Coherent naming scheme for precompiled binary images
A few bugs solved (see below)

Changes since the previous release (3.2-rc1):

Based on OpenWrt 15.05-rc2 Chaos Calmer
Improved support for Ubiquiti XW devices
Using latest BMX6 stable version
Improved sysupgrade hash calculation method based on the device name
802.11s mesh support
...

Changes since the latest stable release (3.1):

Based on OpenWrt 15.05-rc1 Chaos Calmer RC1
Support for new devices (Ubiquiti XW devices, TP-Link and Ralink/Mediatek-based devices)
802.11s mesh support
...

Fixed bugs since the latest stable release (3.1):

#374 Fixed missing Mesh DNS menu
#378 Fixed initial configuration of minisnmpd
#377 Use appropriate VLANs declaration in /etc/config/nework
#376 Fixed typo in qmpcontrol configure_wifi
#375 Fixed VLAN12 issue in Nexx WT1520 devices
#373 Use coherent naming scheme
#371 Fix typo in NSM5-XW no_vlan_devices
#369 Nexx WT3020-4M images have the appropriate size
#368 Added netperf back
#367 Added mini-snmpd back
#365 Added missing mini-snmpd package
#362 Added kmod-ipt-nat package to provide iptables to the qmp-tiny-node target
#361 Added a hook for TP-Link TL-WR842N[D]-v2 devices to set the default Ethernet devices LAN/WAN roles
#358 Added new sysupgrade hash for the TP-Link TL-WR2543ND devices. Also fixed the default Ethernet devices' LAN/WAN roles
#357 Fixed a bug in mDNS that made the system run out of resources and crash
#356 Submitted a pull request to update LibreMap's deprecated luci.fs dependency
#355 Updated image creation for Alix boards
#351 Updated feeds.conf file
#345 Improved wireless interfaces autodetection
#342 Removed web interface's luci.fs dependency
#341 Updated qmp-guifi package
#340 Updated qmp-guifi package
#337 Corrected 40 MHz channels allocation on the 5 GHz band (HT40+/-)
#336 Selected a valid default channel in the 5 GHz band
#332 Changed the enabling DHCP default value
#331 Added new sysupgrade hash for TP-Link TL-WDR4900
#329 Removed HTML tags around Network testing results
#314 Updated default DNS servers

Known issues

#366 Devices based on the Atheros ar71xx (Atheros) platform containing a switch (e.g. NanoStation M5 XW) can not combine untagged+tagged VLANs on the same port. Therefore, switched cable interfaces can't be used for BMX6 meshing

The qMp 3.2-rc3 firmware binaries can be found at http://fw.qmp.cat/Releases/3.2. Otherwise, you can compile your own images with your preferred options:

git clone git://qmp.cat/qmpfw.git qmpfw-3.2
cd qmpfw-3.2
git fetch --tags
git checkout tags/v3.2
git checkout -b v3.2
QMP_GIT_BRANCH=v3.2 make checkout
cd build/qmp && git checkout -b v3.2 && cd ../..
make J=n T=target

where n is the number of parallel threads to use in the compilation (1, 2, ..., 8...) and targets is the name of the device target to build the image (list them by issuing the command make list_targets).

Categories Development

Network Bogotá on the Bogotá Software Freedom Day 2015

Network Bogotá will be giving a brief talk about Open and Free Mesh Networks - 15/10/2015

Leonardo Taborda from Network Bogotá (a community-driven telecommunications project based on Free Wireless Mesh Networks) lets us know about their participation in Bogotá's Software Freedom Day 2015:

Network Bogotá will be attending the Software Freedom Day 2015 in Bogotá (http://sfdbogota.info/). Initially, we are going to give a brief conference about open and free mesh networks, and we are also going to have a hacklab where NWBTA will give a live demo of a small mesh network, in this case running with qMp, as well as the nodes running in Bogotá with qMp.

Our gratitude goes to Leonardo and the NWBTA community for spreading the word about Free Community Networks and qMp.

Categories Networks, Community

qMp 3.2 Clearance RC3

Third release candidate is available for testing - 05/08/2015

qMp 3.2 Clearance release candidate 3 (RC3) has just been published. This release candidate is aimed at adventurous users willing to test it and provide feedback before the final 3.2 release.