[Battlemesh] What hardware still works?

[Valent Turkovic]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 2:06 PM, Paul Gardner-Stephen <
paul at servalproject.org> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 11:13 PM, Valent Turkovic <
> valent at otvorenamreza.org> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 2:41 AM, Paul Gardner-Stephen <
>> paul at servalproject.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> We are interested in joining the conversation with them to find an
>>> alternative platform for use in our Mesh Extender devices, instead of the
>>> TP-LINK devices.  I suspect that anything that is useful for us, will also
>>> likely be useful for the community more generally.  One of the things we
>>> would love to see is a router with a large on-board secondary flash
>>> storage, instead of having to hang storage off the USB2 port, which apart
>>> from anything else consumes quite a lot of power.
>>>
>>> Paul.
>>>
>>
>> What it the price point at which you would go for? Would you go for board
>> that is 3x the price of TP-LINK board is it was open hardware and certified
>> with FCC?
>>
>
> Unsure. Our humanitarian driven use-cases are somewhat price sensitive.
>

What kind of humanitarian work do you do? Have you seen www.meshpoint.me?
It is still in development but prototypes using tp-link devices are in
field tests right now, and out custom BMS for LiFePO4 cells is being
developed. Maybe we could work together with you on any future humanitarian
projects with you?

For us price is important but not the most important thing in humanitarian
work we did and plan to do. Most important thing to us is that network can
be managed and deployed by volunteers who aren't trained network and
wireless engineers or geeks :) Because that makes all the difference in how
fast network can be deployed... we managed to deploy hotspot nodes in hours
and not days or weeks because we had such good platform (Nodewatcher) that
Wlan Slovenia guys built.

Without Nodewatcher we would't even try to help in crisis situation because
we would need 10x the man power and they would have to be networking
trained people (at least with basics).


> If the cheapest compliant device was around US$100 instead of US$20 - $30,
> then we would probably be forced to look at making our own devices
> (although we don't have the money for doing this at the moment).
>
> Paul.
>

We are also looking for that now, but seams that even if we would pay
25,000$ for development of our board we would still pay over 50$ per board
if we need "only" 1000-2000 boards. Only if we go over 5000 boards then
prices come down somewhat...
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