Quick Mesh Project

In early September 2014 we received a request from the Guanyem Barcelona movement where they asked us to give support for an event [1] on the 16th September at Cotxeres the Sants, with the idea of streaming the event live on Internet. There wasn't any network available at the venue and the 3G connection might not work if the site was crowded. Volunteers of the GuifiSants [2] community evaluated the options and decided to make it happen. A priori, it seemed a difficult and risky task, since the place was geographically complex (in the Guifi.net coverage sense), the bandwidth requirement was quite high (1 Mbps steadily) and the expected audience was about 1000 people. As you may know, the spectrum used in WiFi technology is narrow and gets saturated easily; adding the transmission power restrictions and the low through-wall signal penetration at 5 GHz the challenge was there.

To brind the GuifiSants network coverage to the venue premises we build the mobile outdoor node shown in the pictures below with the following specs (material gently provided by Routek SL [3], approx. bill of materials cost: 300 €):

• 2x TP-Link WDR-4300 (dual band 2.4/5 GHz)

• 1x Compex WP72 (single band 5Ghz)

• 1x Power Gorilla 21Ah

• Both routers had qMp installed

Using the GuifiSants qMp mesh network of the Sants district, the mobile node was placed close to the entrance of the Cotxeres de Sants building, the Compex router linked with the closest static Guifi.net node (at Plaça Ibèria) ant the TP-Link router provided the WiFi coverage inside the venue, where another TP-Link router provided connectivity to the computer actually streaming the video. The final map is shown below.

The available bandwidth was quite a surprise for us, close to 6 Mb/s (symmetric) before the event started and around 3 Mb/s while it took place with around 1,000 people in the venue.

Finally, the video streaming worked perfectly during the two hours that the event lasted, with a constant upload rate of 1 Mb/s. It was a big success both for the Guifi.net project and for the participative, citizen self-government process in Barcelona. Thanks to all the citizens that, altruistically, make the Free Network possible, more than 30,000 people could watch the live stream of the event headed by the activist Ada Colau.

Source: http://guifi.net/ca/guanyemBCN2014 (25th September 2014)

[1] https://guanyembarcelona.cat/16-de-setembre-ara-toca-guanyar/

[2] http://guifisants.net/

[3] http://routek.net

Support for the XW architecture of Ubiquiti devices (NanoStation M5 XW, NanoStation Loco M5 XW, NanoBeam M5 16 and NanoBeam M5 19 has been added to the qMp firmware generator in the experimental branch, codenamed Kalimotxo. From today on, the nightly compilation that generates the firmware images will also build a specific file for these devices, available at http://fw.qmp.cat/kalimotxo.

Please, be aware that qMp has not been tested at all with this hardware, so the firmware images may not work at all. Support for the new XW devices, which have been shipped since early 2014, depends too on OpenWrt supporting them.

If you have tested qMp with the NSM5-XW / NSLM5-XW, we will be happy to read your reports.

We are experimenting with the WRTnode.

qMp is already available for this tiny and powerful device. You can find the ready-to-install binaries of the development version in our official repository: http://fw.qmp.cat/kalimotxo

It can be seen in the pictures that we connected several elements to the board pins:

• Ethernet cables (the device integrates a 5 ports switch)
• a USB camera
• a relay to remotely lock/unlock a door

The WRTnode performs very good, it has a huge amount of flash memory (16 MB) and a MIMO 802.11n 2.4 GHz radio which seems to work quite fine also in adhoc mode. It is actually a nice device for use in home automation, drone/robotics stuff, as a control device (to provide access to other devices via the serial port, for instance) and so on, while meshing in 2.4 GHz using qMp.

Check the article with the full set of pictures here: Experimenting with the WRTnode.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Version 3.0.1 of qMp Clearance has just been released. This bugfixing release solves issue 292, which affected some specific combinations of devices and wireless cards (namely Alix2 with certain 802.11n miniPCI radios).

Upgrading your device is only recommended if affected by this bug, otherwise there will be no difference.

Changes from previous release (3.0):

Fixed SHORT-GI-20 compatibility issues with some miniPCI devices in some specific boards.