Meshing, rugged, free/open wifi routers for refugee camps

First of all, there is a significant difference in wave amplitude between a AM/FM radio signal and WiFi and DECT signals. The more the signal is in the microwave range, the more EMF hypersensitive subjects are affected. Experiments about this range back to the 60s at least.
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/273787.pdf
Radar sickness is also a well-reported phenomenon, ranging back many decades.
In addition, a AM/FM radio station is usually further away than a WiFi emitter.

Our software part is here - https://github.com/wlanslovenija/nodewatcher

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Dig trough our Hackaday project page and you will get to know all of our parts, both sofware, hardware and mechanical… and if you have any questions feel free to just shout it out :slight_smile:

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Check out our Hackaday page. We are a distributed project build from different open source parts. Don’t dismiss so easy :slight_smile: We should make it more clear that MeshPoint github is not best place to see all parts of that are used to build this.

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This is another similar project, based in Germany:
https://freifunk.net/en/
They use off the shelf routers with special firmwares. The router then automatically mesh together. The protocol is not very advanced, but it works. You can download their firmware if you want to try.
They helped a lot during the refugee crisis in Germany 2 years ago as they could install wifi on refugee camps.

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I’ve never heard ‘electrosmog’ as a concern with ‘smart meters’; the usual areas of disquiet involve having a proprietary RZf transmitter with an often deeply questionable security design spewing the details of home electrical activity into the ether for any interested parties plus billing purposes.

That is because you don’t live in France where there is a big discussion exactly about that concern as we speak.

You can use rPis for router duty; but they are kind of a tepid fit: the substantial RAM bump and option for actually-useful amounts of storage make them quite handy for situations where you are adding additional functions to the job description; but they rather poorly qualified for router stuff: NICs hang off the sole USB 2 port or i2c, and nothing integrated into the SoC, no PCIe options, GPU and video output that generally goes to waste in that application.

The AR9344 that I think these guys are using, by contrast, is a weedy little MIPS core at 530MHz; rarely featuring more than 128mb of RAM, and less flash; but it provides 2.4GHz wifi on-SoC, plus multiple 10/100 wired NICs; and PCIe host and peripheral support. Not a good choice if you need your node to cache or serve substantial amounts of stuff; but router SoCs are pretty good at what they do; and quite cheap; just generally hard to get with much RAM, graphical capabilities, or vendor-endorsed 3rd party firmware development.

About three weeks ago, there was a big article over a whole page of the francophone edition of Metro, a free Belgian newspaper for people who travel by train. But I read about smart meter concerns before on English-speaking sites.
It’s here: http://bit.ly/2HqK9FS

I thought we stopped worrying about that in the early 2000s…

Well, yes. The radio stations broadcast in the tens to hundreds of kilowatts; strong WiFi ones are in the half a watt. UHF television pumps out megawatts in frequency ranges that overlap WiFi, for equivalent fields at distances of more than 1000 times the WiFi range (compare roughly ten meters to about 14 kilometers.)

As for radar – that one is directional and runs much more than broadcast power. No question you can get sick if someone points a few megawatts at you in a frequency range that you could use to cook food, and keeps it collimated so you get the full treatment.

Now about the physiological effects of microwatts per square meter of RF?

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You mean we stopped worrying when we started filling our living and working spaces with all sorts of wireless devices?
I actually remember times when we didn’t worry about led poisoning or asbestos. My mom had a big asbestos glove in her kitchen to get the hot stuff from the oven. Some may also remember when we didn’t worry about smoking or sugar… ah, the good times :slight_smile:

It’s not the wattage. It’s the amplitude of the signal and how close it is to microwaves. A UHF/VHF signal has a large amplitude, so it can travel far distances. A WiFi signal has a very short amplitude, so it can deliver a strong signal at close range. This is what affects the body. You can pop a corn by using enough cellphones, just from the microwave signal. This is what we hold to our heads. Watt is not amplitude. Watt is power.

Horseshoes and hand grenades are where close enough counts. A frequency close to the resonant frequency won’t resonate.

case drawings only. And, yes, I looked at hackaday too.

a 3d printed case and openwrt does NOT an open hardware project make.

Huh? Low frequency = short radius, high frequency = big radius.
Ever saw water boil in a microwave? That’s the close effect of short wave resonating with water molecules.

I take it that electrodynamics wasn’t your best class in university.

Hint: all electromagnetic radiation – light, x-rays, cosmic microwave background, all of it – propagates until it runs into something after it gets out of the very close in “near field” radius. In that region, from a few wavelengths to infinity, the power density (watts per square meter) falls off inversely to the square of the distance from the source. This is as true for WiFi as it is for sunlight.

<headdesk> This is gibberish. “Amplitude” of an electromagnetic wave is the wattage. You can measure the power density (“Poynting vector”) or you can measure the individual electric and magnetic field strengths (volts/meter or tesla) but they all play together. The power is basically the product of the electric and magnetic field strengths, which are proportional to each other so that the power just varies as the square of either one – the relationship does not change with frequency (which is inversely proportional to wavelength; their product is the speed of light.)

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That depends on the damping (energy loss) of the system. Your car and its suspension has a resonant frequency – you can tell going over washboard roads – but the “shock absorbers,” or “dampers” as the Brits call them, spread out the response while reducing it.

The wikipedia article on resonance is really quite good.

Dude, seriously, I’ve never been to university. I’m a self-taught graphic designer.
Also, I’m wondering why someone like me needs a degree in physics to explain to people that something is obviously giving him headaches. You can bring up what you want, I still get headaches, I’m not a paranoid person, I love tech and I’m extremely annoyed with not being able to use WiFi or wireless phones. I didn’t read an article or see a documentary and then decide I had an issue. I had an issue and I checked by try and error what the cause might be and see there, without wireless, my life got better on the spot. So I’ll leave it to smarter people to explain why if my notion of microwave vs radio signal is not precise enough to hold up to your theories. I’ve been holding up to guys explaining me why Nuclear Energy wasn’t dangerous. That was in the 80’s before Tchiernobyl. They too had all sorts of smart things to say and look now. So yeah, you sound smart but you sure can’t explain why I get headaches from DECT phones. Oh yeah, I guess it’s paranoia. Right.

A GCSE in physics taught me enough to know that @lumbercartel is right.

also

“Science doesn’t know everything” (also “Science can’t explain X[2]”) is an argument that asserts that, because of science’s lack of knowledge about something, something else must be true. The implication is that, because science does not have an answer (or a sufficiently good answer) already, any claim can take its place, even though it has no supporting evidence. The argument is closely linked to the Science was wrong before and God of the gaps arguments.

The argument is overused by woomongers and theists alike, and is used to disparage the application of scientific methods to problems under discussion or analysis.

The argument is an informal fallacy and a prime example of an argument from ignorance.

The phrase “science was wrong before” (or variations thereof, such as “science has been wrong in the past”, “science is only human”, or “science is not infallible”) is a technique used in order to reject scientific consensus, especially on evolution and global warming. It usually works like this:
“”Alice: A scientific consensus has built around theory X and it is supported by many lines of robust evidence.
Bob: Ah, but science has been wrong before.

The “science was wrong before” gambit is an example of both the continuum fallacy and the nirvana fallacy.

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