Toronto E-City Planners and Hydro don't mesh

Generally I don’t speak out when a company or the city does something really insane. But I just wonder why the Toronto Hydro will be experimenting with new electronic meters that will be connected together using wireless mesh at 900 MHz. I can’t believe it. First the city with it brilliant E-City plan wants to use wireless mesh so the entire city population can go wireless and now the City’s Hydro want to do the same but with meters.

Do you think Toronto Hydro and E-City planner should talk?

Hydro want to use wireless Mesh at 900 MHz while the E-City is planning at 2.4 Ghz. It behooves me why Toronto Hydro and E-City wants to spend our money to build a wireless mesh. Almost every city department want to go wireless in City of Toronto and most of the utilities can benefit from going wireless. But yet they don’t know how to simply communicate together, never mind mesh!

What is actually happening is our E-City planners have failed us once again. They are not with out vision but they sure out without leadership. When I talked to CIO of City of Toronto he told me that when we deploy wireless mesh in the City of Toronto we would use “Best Practices.” Wireless mesh is so new that best practices have yet to be developed never mind adopted.

Wireless mesh will be outstanding for city of Toronto and the Province of Ontario. I just hope that the planner can see beyond there own requirements.

Mini-ITX Intel board is a Shelton chip set

Well I getting overwhelm with the request regarding the new intel mini-itx board that I got from Hong Kong. The board was sent to me to test Locustworld OS. And preliminary test show that it works. I currently testing long term and will test for heat and cold environments.

The processor is amazing fast compared to a Via 1 Ghz this Intel board seems to be faster. The board has not been well documented but the price point seems to make this an instant winner. I read a few article on line http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/print/20040902154930.html This article claim that it is faster than a comprablible Via board.

The company I am dealing with is call Starnet International. I made a few tranactions with them and everything came with in a few days of placing the order. You can see them on line at http://www.starnetwifi.com/

I very cautious of doing business over the internet and especial non North American countries; however, so far doing business with Starnet seems to be good. There prices are amazing! I have asked them to stock prism 2.5 radio cards.

15 Seconds of fame continues

As many of you heard I was quoted in the Toronto Star. For the ones that did not hear you can read the article either on Toronto Star website or http://www.n5r.com/articles/2005/torontostar16may05.asp

This is the first time that my statistic counter show that Canadians actually visited my website in numbers. Most of visitors are international because of the subject mater.

Gosh darn I just wish I good have promoted wireless mesh better!

Via board vs Intel board

Well it's been a few days now and I left my new Intel mini-itx board running. I changed it over from an Uplink node to repeating node. Since it is still in the lab I decided to put on a 300 mW demarchtech radio card. The radio card is working very well. This ensure me when I link clients to the node for testing, that the loudest radio card is the one that is linked up too. Other words the one that yells the loudest is heard.

Intel board has given me really superior performance. I have a new Via board 500 Mhz and you know you can see a bit of the performance lag on the Via compared to the 1 Ghz intel board.

I'm not about to give a comparison between the two boards but the intel board has the minimum connectors on it, such as, video connectors, mouse and keyboard, USB, Ethernet and sound. All the rest of the parallel ports and serial ports are missing.

I believe with the high speed and less junk on the Intel board performance is much better.

The via board in comparison is half the speed of the intel, It contains ports on a PC link parallel, however LW has optimized the Via board to work with it's product.

You can see the difference in Wiana: Via boards show neat things like temperature while Intel board has not be optimized.

I would like to see if I could send another board to Locustworld with documentation so that they can optimize this board to work fully with Wiana.

Ok many have been waiting for this comment. The price:

Intel Mini-itx board cost $85 US 1 Ghz
Via Mini-itx board cost $128 US 500 Mhz

You decide!

Answer to the comments

Yep, I ain't no writer. Sure I have written many things and do this on a continuing basis. But I sure need an editor!

Regarding the secret to my success. Yeah I will have to think about writing a new blog. May be I will get the company I work for N5R.com to come up with a blog for digital marketing.

Thanks for all the comments and emails. I really appreciate the feedback!

15 seconds of fame is over now back to the wireless

Well my 15 seconds of fame is over and I now back to the wireless mesh. I continue to test the Intel mini-itx board and found it to be very strong as an uplink node. Preliminary test show that it easily handle 1.5 meg for 5 hours straight.
I am planning to run this in lab for the next week to see how well it performs. Oh I put on it a 300 mW radio card. The connectivity is outstanding!

Toronto Star Article :There are no rules"

Today in the Toronto Star my blog was published. This blog is designed for a small, world-wide group of people on technical issues relating to open source wireless mesh. Since I have a following of people, the articles in this blog are focused on daily events. Reading through the blog may not make sense to all you savvy readers.

Regarding the statistics that were quoted in the paper it I need to qualify them as this did not come instantly but over a year worth of work. Likewise when searching in Google the reason I get a high listing is I've have been working at this for over 6 years.

Please note that over 192,000 readers may have read my blog and viewed my website but comparing it to the world wide population of internet users, the number is very small.

Mini-ITX Intel board - Success

Well the saga continues. I’ve started to test the mini-itx Intel motherboard and first few tries were a failure! When you don't have a manual you sometimes have to do trial and error. In my case it error and error then Viola! Success. The Intel board finally booted up with Locustworld OS.

I have successfully been able to register the software with Locustworld's WIANA. It is currently running and I will let it run overnight.

Initially I had the Intel running as an uplink node. Once configured, I change the node to run as a repeater node. I have a number of tests to run.

I am planning to upgrade the software in the next 24 hours.

If the board runs well I write an article on how to configure this board. It is a little tricky because the default in the bios is set for switch with no auto power up. I currently do not have a switch connected to and I was able to configure it with auto power.

My hope is that this board will be an alternative to the mini-itx VIA chip set boards.

Mini-ITX Intel board continues

So I am continuing to work on the Mini-ITX Intel board and found a few features on the board. First I was able to go to the bios and change the setting. One was the power setting work with out a power switch i.e. The board can be always on even if a power interruption. This is a feature that I like. When power interruption happens and the power come back on the board automatically boots up. This is similar to the Via board.

I was also able to disable any warning messages. For example I unplug the keyboard and mouse to see if the unit would stop booting up. Sure enough that also work very well.

The problem I am having is the kernel panic happens at when it cannot read to the hard drive. I will replace the hard drive with another device and will try again. I have also been advised to use the secondary ide however, first thing first replace the hard drive and try again.

I noticed that I was able to use the bootloader successfully so the board should be able to use Locustworld OS. In most Intel board that I tested failure happens immediately and not in the boot up process.

I will continue to work on this because if I am successful then there is a real alternative to the Via boards!

Mini-ITX Intel board

Well I'm always looking for a good quality board at a fairly low price, to build my wireless network. I was approached by a distributor in China to test out the Mini-ITX Intel board with open source Locustworld. The board cost was one quarter of the price of a similar Via board.

The shipment came promptly with in a few days and since I had most of the parts to assemble it I start about a week later. The board is fanless 1 gig board with built in video USB and single PCI port similar to the Via. For the test I used a regular power supply, HD, wireless card etc.

I was able to easily install Locustworld' open source on to the hard drive but when I start the unit it froze and gave me a kernel panic.

So tried a number of times to reload the software and the same thing happened. I installed a Windows XP to see if everything was working. Well the mouse wasn't work but everything else seemed ok.

I am going to wait for a CF Flash disk to load the software. I have a funny feeling that the hard disk isn't working that well.

If I can get this board to boot up I would really like to see it performance.

Lost part of my connection due to leaves

Well it is spring in Toronto and that mean the leaves are coming out. Well the wireless nodes that I installed in January are loosing some of there connectivity.
I was concern back in January that the height of some of the antennas did not clear the tree tops and sure enough the signal strength has gone down.

To fix the problem I either have to increase the height of the antenna or lower it down to go under the trees. An alternative is to add another MeshAP between the 2 sites.

Never build your wireless network in the winter.

Lost a radio card

I have a number of MeshAP that are outdoor units and some that are indoor units. On my indoor units I have LMR-400 wire attach to the Radio card with an adapter rather than a pigtail. The adapter are a firm connection and they don't loose as much signal as a pigtail.

In this case the pressure of a thick LMR-400 cable rip out the whole radio card thread. I guess a little too much pressure over a period of time can really damage a radio card.

I personally don't like using LMR-400 cable as there is too much signal loss in the cable.

Wow, who would of thought that a connection could be loss because a little pressure from the cable!

New Projects Planned

Ok it has been a few months since I have updated my blog. I have been juggling my time between, my new job with www.n5r.com, traveling, home and working on my network. I haven't had too much time to update the blogger.

I have hinted upon what my next project is going to be. Well there are 3 project currently in the works, they are:

- Testing a New motherboard
- Building a car PC with a dual boot for Windows and Locustworld
- Yes Finally building the Solar power MeshAP.

Testing a New motherboard is going to be fun. I came across a non Via mini-itx board that maybe compatible with Locustworld. Since no body has tested it out yet I have asked a supplier to send me one. If the tests are favorable a new less expensive motherboard with better performance, may be available. However before we can get excited I need to verify that this board works.

Building a car PC with a dual boot for Windows and Locustworld. Car PC have been around for a long time and Locustworld mobile units are nothing new. What I am building is carPC that can have two operating systems in it. The objective is to have a fully functioning PC when traveling and also have a MeshAP when working at the job site.

Finally building the Solar power MeshAP has been a goal for me for a longtime. I about to do some horse trading. If everything works out my objective is to build a Solar MeshAP. Some of the features are:
- off the grid power supply
- 300 mW Radio Card
- No moving parts
- Portability.

I have a lot of planning and procurement to do in the next while.

It going to be a very busy time for me.