An Online Open Source Community Resource

[IDMclean]

Hello Hypography,

What Open Source communities are you a part of, support, critique, or like to show off?

 

I'll start with one I recently found, HarkOpen. It is an open source hardware community. I've posted two projects I am going to pursue.

[alexander]

neat, do tell and do link, i loves hardware hacking :confused:

 

i have been a part of a few, and i now and again post fixes here and there.

 

The CVS video camera project (using those single use cvs video cameras more then a single time :) )

 

Done some code, troubleshooting or helping in Ubuntu, Gentoo, BackTrack, Wireshark, Kismac, Kismet, Drupal, ZenCart, phpbb, php probably others i can't remember, oh radio statler project for hope (mostly open-source internet radio station, project m and a few others i am most likely forgetting. I've helped some projects that appeared on hackaday, and i constantly work on random projects and things, though i'd like a hacker lab/space, where a bunch of hackers can get together and work on whatever they feel like, hardware, software whatever, you know from clusters, robots, clusters of robots, rockets to AUV's, micro controller-controlled AI solar panel arrays, autonomous rovers, rfid tracking and smart house type of stuff...

[IDMclean]

HyperMesh is the project I've posted. I have a blog for it. My goal is to produce a cheap broadband/wireless mesh station. I'm starting a not-for-profit member-owned business to build a free-to-access public mesh network to distribute bandwidth, processing power, and storage. I think I can get people's telephone and internet access services down to yearly payments of around 10-50 dollars.

 

I've started talking with the people of the OMRP project about possibily using their platform to build on. Though the price-per-unit they've cited for a prototype of their board is high in my opinion, but I have to admit naivety in this area.

 

The HyperMesh device is a basic computer with 802.11 s/g/n/b (preferences in that order), IMT-2000, 802.3, and USB 2.0 equipment. VOIP support and autonomous/near-autonomous software is a requirement. It is intended to be a replacement for routers, gateways, modems, and centralized servers. The target price point after mass manufacturing and distribution is less than $50.

 

What do you think about decentralizing and distributing the public networks?

[Michaelangelica]

HyperMesh is the project I've posted. . . . I think I can get people's telephone and internet access services down to yearly payments of around 10-50 dollars.

 

What do you think about decentralizing and distributing the public networks?

The Australian Government wants to roll out a multi-billion $ broadband optic cable to nearly all homes in Australia.

What worries me about this is, by the time they have dug enough trenches to circle the globe a squillion times, some Geek like you will come and find away of sending broadband via breakfast cereal or, as was once mooted, power cables..

Technology is changing at such a pace that optic fibre may be passé by the time it is delivered.

There is no CIA in Oz, the Federal Police are dopes, so even if you do this you are unlikely to be assassinated.:)

[IDMclean]

The Australian Government wants to roll out a multi-billion $ broadband optic cable to nearly all homes in Australia.

 

Personally, I welcome this kind of work because it is synergistic with what I am pursuing. Interesting thing to note: Multiple Input Multiple Output Opportunistic Mesh Networks hold like 90% efficiency across multiple hops. Strix claims 100 Mbps across the air.

 

I've looked at the problem from a few different perspectives, and I think I should focus on the device's controller and bios. Right now, I envision it as a box with an ethernet port. You ssh into it if you need to do configuration or if you want to mod it's software or firmware.

 

I've never built a device before, but I am sure the technology for this is widely available. The trick is to get it into a configuration which is cheap enough to sell for around 10-20 dollars. Once you do that, the network will build itself.

 

The other project I posted is a Stackable Form Factor to replace or supplement ATX.

 

The idea is to encourage scalable hardware configurations, modularity, improve troubleshooting, simplify hardware installation, and reduce the risk of damaging hardware by boxing it.

[IDMclean]

Does anyone know a good primer for VDHL? I'm going to install linux once again so I can get some of the tools.

[alexander]

why dont you grab an already available open wireless platform and build the firmware for it for mesh networking.

 

things you should look at:

roofnet - MIT-written firmware for a WGT634U Netgear wireless router, for mesh networking

 

Also look at already pre-made hardware for you (building hardware is not as simple as you may think)

 

routerboard.com - look at their rb/crd router, its fairly open platform, $99, and some open-source firmware has already been built for it, i think dd-wrt and open-wrt both run on it, but you should check on that

 

Look at the ALIX project - PC Engines ALIX system boards - its open hardware for open platforms and you get a head start with tons of things already running on that platform (its about $120, but it does not come with wireless card or much else for that matter)

 

i'll think of a few more later

[IDMclean]

While it is true that designing and developing hardware is a difficult task, I only need a level of proficiency high enough to convince other people with greater proficiency than myself of the virtue and viability of the concept http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09dhjDcaT7g.

 

Also, it is my goal to develop discrete artificial life, intelligence and, man-machine interfaces. I am using these project as an introduction to circuit design. I've reduced my original concept to a family of successive generations of hardware. I have been surveying existing projects, like the OMRP by OpenPattern; I research material http://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-Student-Manual-Exercises/dp/0521377099 as I need to know it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_learning, so it's a good learning project for me.

 

Later this week, I am going to go back to Dr. Ma and share my rough diagrams with him. Hopefully, he'll like my presentation, and I'll get to pitch my idea to his students.

[alexander]

here's a graphic timeline of idea development

 

:eek: ;) :friday: :shrug: :mobile_ph :)

[IDMclean]

here's a graphic timeline of idea development

 

:) :friday: :mobile_ph :)

 

Alex, you have to be part of some open source community or another. Post some of your connections?

[alexander]

You mean aside from Hypnography? (upon doing some nano-particle metaphysical historiography and experimenting on some fuzzy bunnies, and yes both very and not-so-very cute ones, i have deciphered the meaning of "hypography", and by that what it was supposed to be called, but some letters got dropped, so we are left with what we have today, but this "original" name captures the gist of it all)

 

I'm a member and sometimes a presenter at the local GNU Linux Users Group, member and a fairly often presenter at the 2600 community, I've done a lot of things in the past and i am working on a couple of things that interest me for the future, one of which is microprocessor programming on this pcb development board, and i am also thinking of getting into Dajango framework for Python web application development, as i want to go a way that many web developers don't, and use a language outside of the standard today PHP realm (which actually sounds way neat :) ).