[WLANware] SoC Applicant

[Charles Boyd]

Mitar,

Thanks for your response. I have some new thoughts and questions to discuss.


> No, but it requires a rooted phone as we have to do things in unofficial
> ways.
>
> You can always try to get into contact with Google and get official
> support for OLSR. But I think is really take a long time because even
> getting official support for ad-hoc is taking its time:
>
> http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82



>From the looks of it, hacking it together without official support is the
best way for this to get done. I wonder why official support is taking so
long. Are they trying to not step on mobile service providers toes too much?



> I think this would be really useful. More and more we are trying to
> combine our networks internationally. Even this GSoC is a
> collaboration of multiple networks (like Freifunk, Funkfeuer, Ninux,
> wlan ljubljana) and projects (like OpenWrt). So we are finding that we
> have to share more.
>
> http://interop.wlan-lj.net/
>
> And sharing documentation is definitely something which is very
> useful. And translations help in this.
>
> But I think we should coordinate this a little bit more. Find a common
> ground to do it so that there would be no wasted efforts. I am not
> sure but I think Freifunk are planning on internationalizing its page
> and maybe its wiki? So it could be good to coordinate with this. Also
> maybe there is already somebody working on this? Some projects also
> use WikiBooks to document things/manuals/tutorials. There is also
> interop wiki page. This are just my ideas, lets hear also others.


 Absolutely. All of these projects would benefit from having more
internationalized documentation. I read on the Freifunk wiki that expanding
their English documentation is a priority.

Putting out resources that enable programmers all over the world to make a
concerted effort on this kind of technology is something that I am
interested in working on. This idea could be easily included (to a certain
extent, at least) as part of porting OLSRd to Android, and it would be easy
for me to continue working on internationalizing and consolidating this
information when the summer is over and my next semester begins.

I am also interested in continuing to work with Freifunk after GSoC by
testing any future work that is done with porting/developing ad-hoc
protocols to Android (and other platforms).

>
> Exactly this is also what I would like to see. To have this GUI also
> as a diagnostic tool for on-site debugging, planing and deployment. It
> could be also interesting to combine it with some augmented reality
> display of nodes but this is probably too much. ;-)
>
> This is also one of things which would be harder to do on N900.


Excellent thinking. This would be really fun to put together.

Will we be testing the port of OLSR and the GUI we build on Android devices
in a live ad-hoc network? I have a rooted Android mobile phone and a Linksys
WRT router with OpenWRT firmware on it already.

I was reading through the supported hardware list on the Freifunk wiki, and
it says the WRT54G devices will probably not work with the Freifunk
firmware. I have a WRT54G (v1.1) with a 4-port switch. Do you think this
specific hardware would be able to run the firmware? It is not clear to me
if it is the older devices or the newer ones that are known to be
problematic. According to the wiki, it is the WRT54GL that is preferred.

First turn on ad-hoc compatibility. Then configure network interface.
> Then run OLSR (with root privileges). Nothing of this is really a
> problem, but it it unofficial behavior and we should do it
> future-proof and with least tampering to Android system (not to break
> other things).
>
> So, you will have to learn about underlying system, not just official
> documentation. We will use official documentation for GUI part, but
> for putting the phone into the mesh we will have to play differently.



Cool. :)

This project would be a lot of fun. I've been reading up a lot on mesh
networking and mobile ad-hoc networks since I found out about this project,
and I think it would be fascinating to work on this technology all summer.
Diving head first into hacking ad-hoc routing protocols into Android would
also be pretty exciting.

I heard that Android was recently ported to run on the Intel Atom - so
getting OLSR into Android just got a bit more interesting.

-Charles
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