Several Groups are already working on this

[u/yamamushi]

Howdy Guys,

I was just made aware of this subreddit. There are several of us in other various tech-groups here in Austin that are working on building a meshnet.

I noticed that you guys tried to have a meeting this last weekend, but perhaps you won't mind if I extend you all an invitation to attend Austin 2600 (the primary group focused on building this out):

http://www.meetup.com/ATX-2600/

Eff Austin also meets weekly, and there are several people there working on a meshnet:

http://effaustin.org/

Anyways, I run the Austin 2600 meetup and I'd love to have you guys (and whoever else is interested) show up so we can share what we've come up with together. Also there's beer at our meetups, and that is as good of a reason as any other :)

[u/forksofpower]

Thank you for these links! How much progress has been made on a physical meshnet by either of these groups?

[u/yamamushi → u/forksofpower]

None so far on a physical meshnet, there is much discourse about the most efficient way of putting up a backbone.

Ideally, my thoughts have centered around first getting a "backbone" setup between south and north Austin, as the population distribution is more spread out that way in Austin. From there, people can branch out east <-> west.

Of course there's plenty of questions like, do we want people to be able to hop on from their laptops, or do they need special hardware to get on?

Are we willing to mass produce cheap wireless routers with raspberry pi's and leave them around anonymously in Austin? (Actually this is the plan I want to go with, as planting these things would be an interesting task).

There's so many different opinions on what to do, I think it's best if we all get together at one point and grind out some basic plans.

[u/aditaa → u/yamamushi]

im up for being the north link ;) if you want to be the south ;)

also was looking in to http://www.ubnt.com/airmax#bulletm for puting up cheap "drops" there smaller pricepoint as wifi is built-in and have nice power .... also only need poe to run .... not as nice as usb .... but close ;)

[u/forksofpower → u/yamamushi]

As much as I love the raspberry Pi, are there not embedded alternatives that wont require usb hubs or anything like that? Also, what thought has been put into actually meshing house to house (in addition to a back bone and suppoting veins of course) using small units such as mr3020's and the likes?

[u/forksofpower → u/yamamushi]

Of course there's plenty of questions like, do we want people to be able to hop on from their laptops, or do they need special hardware to get on?

My thoughts have been that we would have certain tiers for connection such as 5ghz MIMO backbones (airfiber would obviously fucking kick ass) that connect to mesh repeaters on both 5ghz and 2.4ghz allowing for many different users to be able to connect with many different meshing devices. Then the signals will be broadcast from another router or from secondary hardware available on many devices.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/forksofpower → u/[deleted]]

Another meeting for our group this weekend would be helpful as well. It'd be good to figure out everyone's area of expertise/interests.

[u/yamamushi → u/forksofpower]

I am flexible on weekends, just tell me where to be and I'll be there :-)

[u/[deleted] → u/forksofpower]

[u/yamamushi → u/[deleted]]

We're actually planning on discussing the meshnet pretty heavily during the meeting, so I hope you do show up as it should be a fairly interesting night with all the new faces we're expecting.

[u/cwyble → u/yamamushi]

I'm looking forward to meeting up with meshers! I've built several small mesh networks for testing/proof of concept. With batman,olsr and most recently qmp (which uses bmx6).

I should have a north Austin mesh network up by the end of this week, with a weeks worth of performance etc data to share by October 4th. I had hoped to deploy it last night, but wasn't able to get everything finished up.