4 ms·

Now it just needs to charge / run from solar and it can be dropped anywhere with signal. I wonder what sort of wattage this thing draws.

xx_ns 6y ago
Author here! I'll try to figure the power draw out some time in the future. Currently, the phone's just always plugged in and being powered over USB.
- voltagex_ 6y ago
  The Pinephone is weird in that you'll need to either have or emulate a battery to have the modem turn on.
vidarh 6y ago
For a while I've really liked the thought of small little cheap hardened devices that could be surreptitiously dropped to act like wifi extenders as a "guerilla mesh". Of course there'd probably need to be some thought put into making them safe and look harmless enough not to trigger any kind of severe response if found. But imagine taking a bag around town and dropping "disposable" devices with low enough power use to mostly stay online w/solar and form a mesh network all over the place. I think the biggest challenge to getting somewhere small enough that it can be "dropped anywhere" is definitively the solar panels. If you add the qualifier "where you have permission" it gets a lot easier - I don't think you need a very large panel to be able to power something suitably basic like this.
- spicybright 6y ago
  I would love to see someone run the electricity draw numbers on a theoretical build of this, accounting for solar panel output, battery longevity, and how long it could theoretically stay online based how long the sun is up each day. In my head I'm thinking an air tight tupperware container with a pi zero inside, setup for meshing. It would be cool if it was fairly flat and had panels on both sides, so you could throw it on a roof top and be reasonably sure it'll land with a panel facing up to run.
- cbradford 6y ago
  This is a fabulous idea. I would pay to fund that
- ashkankiani 6y ago
  Displacing the heat in continuous usage will also probably be a challenge, not to mention figuring out how to deploy updates, having nodes be compromised, impostor nodes, latency, etc. I mean it's an idea I've thrown around a lot in my head since college, but in all my scenarios, I never opened it up to the public, it was just going to be used for me. If that's the case, then yeah it's doable.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Depends on climate, I guess. I'm in London and here the far greater problem would be moisture and not heat dissipation. Deploying updates is not that hard - you'll want a flash that's large enough for at least two partitions so you can keep a known good version around. Other than that, signing updates isn't a big deal, and tamper-proofing key storage enough for casual use isn't that hard. I wouldn't trust sending senstitive data clear-text over a network like that, but I wouldn't do that over public wifi anyway. Latency is a bit more of a challenge if you're somewhere that'd need lots of hops, but if you are then presumably the alternative is worse, especially if you have nodes with LTE connectivity as a possible fallback.
- goda90 6y ago
  Something I used to daydream about was a self-deploying mesh using drones to drop off solar powered nodes on roofs around a city. It could be a sort of emergency deployment system. The drones could go back and pick up nodes that stopped working for some reason and bring them back to base.
- myself248 6y ago
  Seems quite a lot of us have had the same idea. I keep thinking the Meshtastic network is heading in that direction, maybe Disaster.Radio might have some features, and generally there seem to be a ton of projects that contain some but not all of the pieces you'd want. I'm down to build the hardware, I just haven't a clue on the software side of things.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    I think it really depends on use-case. A lot of mesh projects get stuck on really large scale, but if your goal is just to be able to build networks where the number of hops between any given node and one with uplinks is realtively limited - so more "range extender" than a replacement for normal ISPs, the software is an "easy" problem. If you can come up with a hardware package that is resilient enough, then "all" you need on the software side is a small Linux install and a bootloader setup that will try either of at least two boot partitions. You'll want a watchdog to force a reboot to a know good install if it doesn't respond after a while. Routing is the tricky bit, but as mentioned if the number of nodes is small enough a small routing daemon to periodically exchange routing information and discovery performance fluctuations is not a big deal.

xx_ns 6y ago

Author here! I'll try to figure the power draw out some time in the future. Currently, the phone's just always plugged in and being powered over USB.

voltagex_ 6y ago
The Pinephone is weird in that you'll need to either have or emulate a battery to have the modem turn on.

vidarh 6y ago

For a while I've really liked the thought of small little cheap hardened devices that could be surreptitiously dropped to act like wifi extenders as a "guerilla mesh". Of course there'd probably need to be some thought put into making them safe and look harmless enough not to trigger any kind of severe response if found. But imagine taking a bag around town and dropping "disposable" devices with low enough power use to mostly stay online w/solar and form a mesh network all over the place. I think the biggest challenge to getting somewhere small enough that it can be "dropped anywhere" is definitively the solar panels. If you add the qualifier "where you have permission" it gets a lot easier - I don't think you need a very large panel to be able to power something suitably basic like this.

spicybright 6y ago
I would love to see someone run the electricity draw numbers on a theoretical build of this, accounting for solar panel output, battery longevity, and how long it could theoretically stay online based how long the sun is up each day. In my head I'm thinking an air tight tupperware container with a pi zero inside, setup for meshing. It would be cool if it was fairly flat and had panels on both sides, so you could throw it on a roof top and be reasonably sure it'll land with a panel facing up to run.
cbradford 6y ago
This is a fabulous idea. I would pay to fund that
ashkankiani 6y ago
Displacing the heat in continuous usage will also probably be a challenge, not to mention figuring out how to deploy updates, having nodes be compromised, impostor nodes, latency, etc. I mean it's an idea I've thrown around a lot in my head since college, but in all my scenarios, I never opened it up to the public, it was just going to be used for me. If that's the case, then yeah it's doable.
- vidarh 6y ago
  Depends on climate, I guess. I'm in London and here the far greater problem would be moisture and not heat dissipation. Deploying updates is not that hard - you'll want a flash that's large enough for at least two partitions so you can keep a known good version around. Other than that, signing updates isn't a big deal, and tamper-proofing key storage enough for casual use isn't that hard. I wouldn't trust sending senstitive data clear-text over a network like that, but I wouldn't do that over public wifi anyway. Latency is a bit more of a challenge if you're somewhere that'd need lots of hops, but if you are then presumably the alternative is worse, especially if you have nodes with LTE connectivity as a possible fallback.
goda90 6y ago
Something I used to daydream about was a self-deploying mesh using drones to drop off solar powered nodes on roofs around a city. It could be a sort of emergency deployment system. The drones could go back and pick up nodes that stopped working for some reason and bring them back to base.
myself248 6y ago
Seems quite a lot of us have had the same idea. I keep thinking the Meshtastic network is heading in that direction, maybe Disaster.Radio might have some features, and generally there seem to be a ton of projects that contain some but not all of the pieces you'd want. I'm down to build the hardware, I just haven't a clue on the software side of things.
- vidarh 6y ago
  I think it really depends on use-case. A lot of mesh projects get stuck on really large scale, but if your goal is just to be able to build networks where the number of hops between any given node and one with uplinks is realtively limited - so more "range extender" than a replacement for normal ISPs, the software is an "easy" problem. If you can come up with a hardware package that is resilient enough, then "all" you need on the software side is a small Linux install and a bootloader setup that will try either of at least two boot partitions. You'll want a watchdog to force a reboot to a know good install if it doesn't respond after a while. Routing is the tricky bit, but as mentioned if the number of nodes is small enough a small routing daemon to periodically exchange routing information and discovery performance fluctuations is not a big deal.