[WLANware] MeshApp Update - 25/07

[Charles Boyd]

Hi,

To keep better track of progress with my SoC project, I am going to be
making daily updates to the mailing list about what is going on with the
development.

The last week or so a lot of time was spent on writing a C program that
starts/stops olsrd, which gets called by the Android application on a button
press. Starting olsrd this way was easy, but stopping it was not so easy
(without a simple way to keep track of the PID) -- so today I began writing
a shell script to do this.

This also coincides with enabling ad-hoc mode on Android (automatically),
which is another part of the project in need of immediate attention.

Thankfully, I am not completely in the dark here because others have worked
on this way before me. Sven-Ola's port of olsrd to Android (
http://lists.olsr.org/pipermail/olsr-dev/2009-September/003283.html)
contains a simple shell script which toggles Ad-Hoc Mode and OLSRD on
Android. For now I am working with a modification of this script and
executing it through a native C function which will be accessible to the
Android application through a shared library.

Ad-Hoc and OLSRD on Android is pretty straightforward (assuming you have
root), and I was able to connect to a mesh node without much trouble using
steps similar to what is written by Sven-Ola.

I have also (hopefully) made some significant improvements to the code
responsible for generating a config file for olsrd. Right now it is all
hard-coded stuff, but I intend to start making it more portable and robust
over the next few days (once all of this scripting is worked out). Loading
plugins (txtinfo and nameservice in particular will be used by MeshApp) to
olsrd should work once this is finished as well.

Another high priority task is implementing the GUI for Android. I spent some
time refining the GUI layout and defining basic preferences/settings, but
this should get more attention after the underlying functionality is fully
implemented (as GUI should be built around what functionality is available).
Right now it is just two grey buttons on a black background and some text. I
am changing the resources around so that MeshApp uses: a better layout
scheme (RelativeLayout), drawable icons/buttons instead of the dull
defaults,  and informative strings that will be displayed by the GUI.

Tomorrow's update will be mainly links to ticket comments, as I expect to
have Milestone 0.1 mostly (if not entirely) closed out tomorrow once the
code I have been working on today is ready to commit to the repository.

That's all for now. Any thoughts, questions, or suggestions would be greatly
appreciated.

- Charles
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