It wasn’t long after Village Telco got started that Terry reached out to express an interest in the project and to begin to share his expertise. Little did I know that those initial emails would turn into a collaboration that helped Village Telco achieve so much more than I would have believed possible. He was a brilliant engineer who delighted in technical problem-solving. His hard work and commitment, all of which he did as a volunteer, resulted in professional quality software that was the foundation of the project.

But that wasn’t his biggest contribution by any means. Terry helped everyone. He was a passionate believer that everyone deserves affordable access to communication and knowledge and treated questions and requests for support with thought and care. Anyone who has been involved with the Village Telco community for any length of time has experienced first hand what a kind, selfless, and generous person Terry was. He shared his considerable expertise with everyone and was willing to support anyone who asked for help. He was what any open source project dreams of having; a brilliant, committed and generous contributor. But he was more than a contributor. We became friends as we worked through the many challenges that Village Telco faced. It is safe to say that Village Telco would not have even gotten out of the gate without his help. He was also just fun to talk to. We never met in person but had no end of chats, emails, and calls. I could not have asked for a better ally and friend in the work we did.

After Village Telco was wound up, we stayed in contact with his work on the Digital Library Project. He continued to use his considerable expertise in developing affordable access-to-knowledge technologies for unserved regions. I don’t know that I have ever met a more decent human being. There is comfort in knowing that he lives on in the many, many people he touched with his work. As my friend and fellow collaborator Elektra says “We are really only dead if nobody remembers us anymore.” I shall miss him dearly. My way of remembering him will be to try to embody his thoughtfulness and generosity of spirit in helping others. My heart goes out to his wife and family for their loss.

If you would like to leave a testimonial to Terry or share a personal experience, you can visit https://www.terrygillett.com/

– Steve Song

The post In memory of Terry Gillett first appeared on Village Telco.

The Digital Library Project provides a simple way to serve a wide variety of essentially static web content in a classroom situation where there is no Internet connection, just using re-purposed low cost WiFi router devices. Students can access the content via a web browser on client devices such as PC, laptop, tablet or smart phone. Teachers can easily share local files via USB.

Kolibri

Going a step further, LearningEquality.org have developed the Kolibri learning platform, which provides a wide range of content from an on-line library, including Khan Academy in various languages. As well as the static content, the library modules may include exercise and test worksheets for students to complete. The students’ progress may be recorded and presented as a variety of reports to the students and teachers. There is also an on-line Kolibri Studio facility that supports the creation of new library content. Thus the Kolibri system provides a more complete learning platform.

The Kolibri system will run on a range of platforms from single board computers through to Linux and Windows servers. A good single board computer and WiFi will support a class of 30 or so students, making it possible to target a $100 classroom implementation.

Low Cost Platforms

The RPi4 device is an obvious target platform and is directly supported by LearningEquality.org, however the cost and availablilty have been problematic for some time.

Quadra is a small Linux based device developed by Inovato.com. It is based on the Turewell T95 Mini device originally sold as an Android TV set top box, and uses an Allwinner H6  SoC Quad-Core Cortex-A53 ARM CPU with 2Gb RAM and 16GB of eMMC storage, running the  Armbian Debian 11 (Buster) 64bit operating system.

This device makes an adequate, low cost classroom micro-server for the Kolibri system when equipped with suitable SD card storage and WiFi.

Inovato provide the Quadra device with the operating system already loaded into internal eMMC memory.

We have produced image files that contain the Quadra system with Kolibri pre-installed and ready to run. These image files can be downloaded and burned onto a suitable SD card in order to run the Kolibri system from SD card rather than the limited internal memory. (A Kolibri system with a full installation of Khan Academy can easily exceed 64GB in size.)

This approach means that the original Quadra system is not modified, and if the system is booted without the SD card it will boot to the original operating system.

Caution: It is possible to purchase the T95 Mini and T95 Maxi devices directly from various marketplaces, however the hardware design can change considerably. In particular it is necessary to ensure that the CPU is Allwinner H6, and not the alternative H616 which is not compatible.

Download

Firmware files for Quadra-Kolibri and associated documentation are available for download here:
https://terabox.com/s/1se4fp28Ajb73V1qcQ_nAzg

Additional Devices

There is a wide variety of Android TV boxes available on the market. The Inovato Quadra device has the advantage of an additional layer of QA and testing, and so should be quite reliable. On the other hand, it is a minimal platform for classroom use, and there are devices available with more powerful CPUs and additional RAM that will provide a more capable Kolibri platform. We are looking into these devices and will publish additional firmware as appropriate. LearningEquality.org also provide excellent documentation for generic implementations, including for the RPi4 device.

A95X F3 AIR Device

Another Android TV box that we have found that has very good performance is the A95X F3 Air device. This device is based on the Amlogic S905X3 Quad-core A55 CPU with 4GB RAM and 32GB ROM.

Firmware and documentation for using this device with Kolibri installed is available here:
https://terabox.com/s/1tBY6Sgs-4cAs-2MPXUoPlA

Caution: When purchasing these devices, make sure that the CPU type is S905X3, as there are other variants that are not compatible.

The post Learning Platform Project first appeared on Village Telco.

Brief descriptions of these deployments can be found here:

Cambodia

Panama

Pakistan

Fileserver

https://download.villagetelco.org/firmware/digital-library/deployments/

The post Digital Library Deployment Projects first appeared on Village Telco.

The idea is to use a low cost WiFi router with on-board storage to provide a library of material that can be accessed by using a web browser on a pc, laptop, tablet or smart phone.
The initial inspiration for this work came from the World Possible RACHEL project. There are a number of similar projects including Internet-In-A-Box (IIAB) which can provide a wide range of content.

Our goal has been to develop a device that could be deployed for a cost in the region of $50 and used standalone in a classroom situation as a simple “appliance” without the need for local technical skills to configure networking or to maintain the device. A teacher should be able to receive a device, plug it in to power and it “just works”.

We have leveraged the previous VillageTelco work on WiFi devices to produce a design that works on readily available WiFi devices using USB and SD card memory devices to store up to 128G of content.

The devices currently supported are from GL-iNet who manufacture a range of OpenWrt based routers that have a good level of system resources and stable design.
Currently supported models include: AR150, AR300M, AR750, MT300N-V2. These are available directly from GL-iNet or through Amazon.

Some older devices such as TP Link MR3020 are also supported although they are constrained by limited memory to use Ver 1 firmware only.

The Digital Library firmware is available here:
https://download.villagetelco.org/firmware/digital-library/releases/

Documentation is available here:
https://download.villagetelco.org/firmware/digital-library/documentation/

The User Manuals are available here:
https://download.villagetelco.org/firmware/digital-library/documents/Release/

The Wiki page is here:
https://wiki.villagetelco.org/index.php?title=Digital_Library_Firmware

There is a wide range of educational content freely available for download from the RACHEL project and other resources. For further information refer to:
https://download.villagetelco.org/firmware/digital-library/documents/Release/Digital-Library-Content.pdf

The firmware provides facilities for uploading local content to add to the main library.

The Digital Library has been successfully deployed in a number of trial locations over the last few years and the feedback used to further develop the firmware.

I hope this work will prove useful.
Please share your experiences on the VillageTelco mailing list.

The post Digital Library Project first appeared on Village Telco.

The MP2 AWD is also easier to deploy than previous models as power, data, and telephony have been integrated into a single ethernet connection thanks to the PoE/TL adaptor that is shipped with the device.  Now both phone, data, and power are all served via a single cable.

The default user setup for the MP2 AWD is to use the 2.4GHz radio for local hotspot access and the 5GHz radio to create the backbone network on the mesh but it can be configured to suit a variety of scenarios.

The MP2 AWD has the following features:

• Everything already included in MP2 Phone including:
  • Atheros AR9331 SoC with a 2.4GHz 802.11n 1×1 router in a single chip
  • Internal antenna for 2.4GHz operation
  • FXS port based on Silicon Labs Si3217x chipset
  • 16/64MB flash/ram memory configuration
  • Two 100Base-T Ethernet ports
  • High-speed UART for console support
• A second radio module based on the MediaTek/Ralink RT5572 chipset which supports IEEE 802.11bgn 2T2R (2×2 MIMO) operation on 2.4 and 5 GHz bands.
• Internal SD card slot capable of supporting local content serving, data caching, and general data storage applications.
• Internal USB port which can be used for a memory device , GSM 3/4G dongle or other USB devices.
• PoE/TL adaptor which will carry Voice/Data/Power via a single Cat5/6 cable to the MP2 AWD. Similar to a passive PoE connector but also carries voice telephone line connection allowing phone to be plugged in remotely from MP2 AWD

Available for order now on the Village Telco store.

The post MP2 AWD – ‘All Wheel Drive’ Edition first appeared on Village Telco.

The major features of this update are:

• Updated OpenWrt version to Chaos Calmer version
• Updated stable batman-adv  mesh software to version 2016.1
• Added factory restore function from Hardware Reset button

Unless you are running a network with some of the first generation Mesh Potatoes, you should consider upgrading to this firmware.   The new factory reset function is particularly handy in that any device can be reset to its factory firmware settings by holding down the reset button for 15 seconds.

Stable firmware is available here:

MP02 –  http://download.villagetelco.org/firmware/secn/stable/mp-02/SECN_4/
TP-Link – http://download.villagetelco.org/firmware/secn/stable/tp-link/SECN_4/
Ubiquiti – http://download.villagetelco.org/firmware/secn/stable/ubnt/SECN_4/

Please subscribe to the Village Telco community development list if you have questions or suggestions.

The post SECN 4.0 Firmware Available first appeared on Village Telco.

Wildernets is alternative firmware for the MP02 that aims to widen the customer base for the MP02 by making initial configuration much easier and adding new features such as Instant Messaging support. So even if you are comfortable operating a SECN 2.X network (as most are on this forum), you may find some of the Wildernets features of interest.

Wildernets is based on the latest version of SECN 2.1 but simplifies both the initial and ongoing configuration making it possible for a user with few technical skills to get the network up and running quickly. In addition to SIP and POTS telephony, Wildernets supports Instant Messaging and local Web content service. Wildernets firmware is complementary to SECN 2.X firmware. It targets a slightly different user base than the traditional VillageTelco user but there is certainly a lot of overlap. Deployment assumptions for SECN firmware have generally included an entrepreneur with the technical “chops” to roll out the network and a user base that may have never had access to even basic telephony services. As we added support for softphone client software on smartphones, tablets, and laptops, the SECN network started to become useful for limited emergency services communications and small groups of users who need communications services in environments that are outside the range of traditional PSTN and cellular services. These users are likely to own smartphones, tablets, and laptops that become much less useful in those environments. With a Wildernets network, these devices become very useful again for calling or instant messaging other people on the network and browsing local Web content. Generally, these users already know the basics of downloading, installing, and using Internet applications on their devices but likely don’t know how to setup networks with IP addresses, netmasks, gateways and application services such as telephony and IM servers. Wildernets goal is to remove that impediment.

For more information check out the Wildernets project page.

The post Introducing Wildernets first appeared on Village Telco.

• OpenWrt Attitude Adjustment:  SECN 2.0 is based on the final release of OpenWrt Attitude Adjustment.  We will continue to tie SECN releases as closely as possible to OpenWrt releases in order to maximise device compatibility.
• Batman-adv:  The SECN firmware now runs the 2013.4 release of batman-adv which includes essential features such as Bridge Loop Avoidance.
• WAN Support:  SECN 2.0 now offers WAN features that allow the device to configure an upstream connection via WiFi, USB Modem or Mesh
• Configurable Ethernet:  Ethernet ports can be individually configured for WAN or LAN function.
• Timezone setting
• WiFi Country Code setting
• Web page for Firmware Upgrade

The SECN 2.0 firmware can be downloaded at http://download.villagetelco.org/firmware/secn/stable/  Please check all downloaded files against their MD5 sums prior to flashing your device.  If you have any questions about upgrading your firmware, please don’t hesitate to ask questions in the development community.

Also available very soon will be an SECN 2.0 firmware for the MP1 which will allow full compatibility among first generation Mesh Potatoes and all current generation devices including the MP2 Basic, MP2 Phone, and TP-Link/Ubiquiti devices.

This final release of the 2.0 SECN firmware wouldn’t have been possible without countless hours of tweaking, testing and innovation by Terry Gillett.  Thanks too to Keith Williamson and Elektra for invaluable support.

The post SECN 2.0 Final Released first appeared on Village Telco.

Some Background

For a bit of background, I became a ham operator in late 2009. I was part of a small group who saw the value of amateur radio to both personal and community emergency communications during times when the “normal” services (phone, internet, cell) might be interrupted or when the use of these services would be impractical. Besides that, it’s a great hobby with a lot of facets and challenges.

It wasn’t long before I joined the Knox and Waldo County ARES/RACES groups. To explain the acronyms:

• The Amateur Radio Emergency Service, or ARES, is the field emergency service arm of the Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL). Organizations supported include such groups as the Salvation Army and Red Cross. In addition to emergency operations, ARES operators also provide communications support to community events such as bicycle and canoe races.
• The Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service, or RACES, is the communications branch of the US Federal Emergency Management System (FEMA). When a governmental entity (here it’s through the county Emergency Management Agencies) requests amateur radio assistance, the response is through RACES.

Somewhere along the line, not long after I got my ham ticket, I heard about Village Telco and the Mesh Potato project. The idea of an infrastructure-independent wifi telephony system sounded like a perfect fit for some aspect of emergency communications. I just wasn’t sure how the project could fit in.

In early 2011 went ahead and ordered 5 Mesh Potatoes to promote some discussion. I promptly semi-bricked one trying to install the SECN software but a friend was able to partially revive it. Around this time I showed the units to the directors at the Knox and Waldo EMAs. Heads nodded affirmatively but the time was not yet ripe and they returned to my home.

2012 Full Scale Exercise

In the fall of 2012 I participated in a full-scale emergency exercise. The scenario was a commuter plane with 18 people on board that made a water landing in Penobscot Bay. Teams were dispatched to a nearby island and the local hospital. Incident management, logistics and operations were conducted from the waterfront park in Rockland. This exercise involved over 20 agencies and upwards of 100 people. Organizations involved included the Knox, Kennebec and Waldo County EMAs, state police, Maine Emergency Management, US Coast Guard, EMTs, etc. A ham was stationed on the island and another at the hospital, plus there were several in a comms trailer at the park. The role of the hams was to relay information from the island (where the “victims” were being triaged) to the base and then to the hospital staff.

It is important to note that exercises of this type work under the premise that normal communications (e.g. cell and internet) and mains power are not available. We work with radios, generators and batteries.

A portion of the team at the Rockland base is shown in the photo to the right. Base at the Rockland waterfront park, 2012. Units from left to right were for logistics, communications and incident management. There were several other units in the area that are not shown. The Time Out Pub did not directly participate.

While communications between the various sites was conducted very efficiently, there were three significant gaps:

• The ham operator at the hospital was located in a trailer outside the hospital building. Relaying messages to hospital staff required that he had to leave his post to deliver the message traffic.
• Likewise, the ham operator on the island had to leave his station to get life flight requests and status reports from the triage team.
• Communications between the comms trailer and other units at the base generally required runners to pass hand written messages.

The above issues are usually at least partially addressed by handing out walkie talkies to everyone that may need to communicate between the various units. This has some problems in that the public safety frequency that is used will become jammed if more than one conversation at a time is attempted. Furthermore, many people are just not familiar or comfortable with communicating using a radio. These radios will also interfere with the other nearby radios, even when they operate on different frequencies. Generally, we just go back to passing paper notes.

Enter the Mesh Potatoes

During early 2013 I dusted off the Mesh Potatoes and installed the current SECN firmware (no problems this time!) and brought the units to the Waldo County EMA office in Belfast, Maine for a more formal demo. We set up the MPs within a large conference room and had the network running in minutes. I declared partial success when Dale Rowley, the EMA director, authorized the purchase of the units from me.

At that point, planning was just beginning for another large-scale exercise that would be conducted over 3 days in mid-August. This exercise was named Dirigo Base ’13 Base/Camp and Wildfire Exercise. The goals of this one were to establish a fairly substantial base camp in a rural area and then deploy communications teams to several remote areas to provide communications support to the firefighting teams.

Involved groups included teams from 6 county EMAs, the Maine Air National Guard, the Maine Warden Service and Maine VOAD (a coalition of nonprofit organizations that respond to disasters).

The base of operations was a large park in Monroe, Maine, a small community just west of Bangor. The area over which we were set up was about 125 meters on a side.

Having the Mesh Potatoes in hand, we set up four of them within the base. They were at the entry control point, the incident command vehicle, the comms trailer and the logistics area. The only challenge was mounting them as we really had nothing except for some cord, cable ties and the like. Needless to say they worked and the feedback was quite positive. Best of all, they were easy to use. After all, everyone knows how to use a telephone.

We did not deploy any Mesh Potatoes to the remote communications sites as only single units were sent to those sites during this exercise. Had this been a real event, there would have been multiple teams at the remote locations (as was the case in 2012) and Mesh Potatoes would have been of value there as well.

I believe that the Mesh Potato will become a necessary part of the EmComm tool kit in Maine.

I’ll conclude with some photos of the Mesh Potatoes taken during this exercise.

Click to view slideshow.

I would like to thank Dale Rowley, Waldo County EMA Director, Brit Rothrock AB1KI, Mike Coulombe KB1UTD and Mike Courtenay KB1DBL for their assistance and input. Also, a special thanks to Steve Song who quickly responded to every question that I sent him.

~Steve Hansen

The post Use of the Mesh Potato at a Wildfire Exercise in Maine first appeared on Village Telco.

Updated mesh protocol with B.A.T.M.A.N. adv 2012.3.0

The 1.1 release of the Village Telco firmware came with the 2011.2.0 release of the batman-adv mesh protocol.  Version 2.0 now has the 2012.3.0 release of the protocol.  Aside from bug fixes, this newer version of batman-adv has a robust bridge-loop avoidance protocol which is important if you are running a mesh network with more than one upstream gateway.  N.B.  This version of batman-adv is not compatible with the 2011.2.0 version in version 1.1 of the firmware.  You can cannot mix version 1.1 and version 2.0 firmwares in a single mesh.  Please don’t upgrade unless you are planning to upgrade all the nodes on your network.

Updated OpenWRT

Version 2.0 is based on the Attitude Adjustment release of OpenWRT.  We are steadily moving towards full compatibility with OpenWRT releases.  The only exception to this at the moment is the kernel on the Mesh Potato which is held at 2.6.37 as opposed to the 3.3.8 version that ships with OpenWRT.  We have done this because the FXS kernel and VoIP driver for the Mesh Potato would require a complete re-write to be compatible with the new kernel and we’ve chosen to focus our efforts on drivers for the 2nd generation Mesh Potato.

WAN Configuration

Thanks to Terry’s efforts, there is now a WAN configuration page in the web interface.  This opens up new configuration opportunities.  For the Mesh Potato, it means that you can configure the MP as a WiFi client.  Why would you do this?  Perhaps you would simply like to use a Mesh Potato as a wireless SIP client to connect to a hotspot.  With the WAN configuration page this is easy to achieve.  It also means that you can use the ethernet port to do Network Address Translation (NAT) in the way that typical access points do as opposed to having the ethernet port bridged with the WiFi interface which is what the default is with the firmware.

It gets even more interesting, however, on devices with multiple interfaces.  On the TP-Link WR703n which has a USB port for connecting a 3G dongle/modem, you can now easily configure this modem as an upstream gateway for the mesh.  The Mesh Potato 2.0 will have a USB port and and two ethernet ports which will be available for WAN configuration.

 Web Firmware Upgrade

Another feature of the 2.0 firmware release is the ability to upgrade the firmware via the web interface.  Flashing the firmware is not necessarily the easiest thing to do for someone new to embedded devices.  Introducing a web upgrade will hopefully make it easier for people to benefit from the ongoing improvements to the mesh software and the configuration tools.

With the 2.0 release you can now do a web upgrade on any Village Telco firmware.  For Ubiquity and TP-Link devices it is possible to preserve the configuration settings with the upgrade.  We are still working on preserving settings on the Mesh Potato upgrade.  Because the memory is somewhat limited in the Mesh Potato, we have to be a little bit more creative in how we perform the upgrade.  We’ll have the setting preservation option sorted out by version 2.1.

What Coming in Version 2.1

For the 2.1 release of the firmware, we’re working on the following:

• the integration of a new release of batman-adv that will include support for network coding
• pre-configured support for Codel, an Active Queue Management algorithm designed to address bufferbloat
• more configuration intelligence in the user configuration to help users choose the most appropriate settings
• an improved mesh status page which will replace the current text only page with a more intuitive graphical representation of wireless signal strength, neighbours, and mesh connections.

Both network coding and codel should provide performance boost to existing hardware and we’ll also see a big improvement in the general user interface as we move from simple shell scripts to general the web interface to an interpreter (haserl).  We’re also rebuilding the web interface on the Twitter Bootstrap framework which should offer more flexibility for displaying on different devices as well as a much more elegant experience in general.  We’ve also moved the project to Github to make it even easier to collaborate.  If you have suggestions and/or would like to collaborate on the development of version 2.1, please join us in the Village Telco development group.

The post New firmware release – Version 2.0 RC1 first appeared on Village Telco.