<div dir="ltr">Hello Again,<div> So my meeting went well enough for me to start sharing some details about our potential deployment in coastal Maine. I have a lot of technical questions that I'll post in a different thread, but I'll try to give some background in this post.</div>
<div> As the Co-Captain of Code for Maine, an affiliate of the Code for America Brigade in Maine, I've found the potential for civic hacking in rural regions is often blocked by a lack of adequate wireless infrastructure. I first encountered this problem when attempting to design a low-cost, <a href="http://www.openvehicletracker.org">open source vehicle tracker</a> for small transit systems and municipal vehicle fleets such as snow plows. 3G networks presented enormous problems, partially due to the wireless carriers, but mostly because coverage in rural places is far from reliable. This is especially true in my current place of residence in South Harpswell Maine, which is more or less a collection of long narrow peninsulas extending deep into Casco Bay north of Portland. Much of the area, including the fire station, school and post office have no cell coverage whatsoever. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, Mesh Networking emerged as a viable alternative for tracking public sector vehicle fleets since nearly all use cases were confined to a fixed route or at least a well-defined service area. Network connections can therefore be planned in advanced by setting up fixed node locations where needed. Of course, this would involve a good deal of field work and logistics, but this is where working in a small town can be an advantage over a larger city where obtaining the necessary approvals may require years of sustained effort. In a small town, it could be as simple as submitting a motion at town meeting.</div>
<div> At least, that was the theory when we first explored the issue over two years ago. Since then, we've discovered the Commotion Project, started working closely with the local Harpswell Middle School, and expanded the focus from vehicle tracking to include environmental monitoring, mapping, and field data collection. We managed to get a hold of three Ubiquiti Routers, and flashed them with a (now deprecated) version of Commotion. The hard part came down to finding a site with decent elevation...</div>
<div> Well now it seems that we've not only found a site, but a potential partner in the form of the local Community Broadcasting Network!</div><div> Long story short... The same people who run the community library also run the <a href="http://www.harpswelltv.org/">Harpswell Community Broadcasting station</a>. I mentioned to the station director (who also serves as town selectman and State Rep.) that we've been looking for a spot to setup a community wireless network and he immediately replied that they've been looking to preserve a water tower that was left to the town when the Navy closed down an old fuel depot. The water tower is quite possibly the highest point in the entire town, and situated in the very center of a peninsula it would have line-of-site for nearly 360 degrees including a big chunk of Casco Bay as far as Portland! I attached a .kmz file showing the towers location and relative elevation in case its possible to get a line-of-site estimate based on frequency and elevation.</div>
<div> The tower is also located in the middle of a park created when the Navy left the Fuel Depot, and it is immediately behind the town fire station. Apparently, the town has been looking for possible uses to justify investing in the upkeep of its structural integrity. I mentioned to them that part of the point of CW is to minimize infrastructural requirements, but it does open up a whole range of possible applications. From weather stations, to webcams, to AIS receivers...</div>
<div><br></div><div> Nevertheless, I made sure they understood that the project does not necessarily need a water tower to be effective, and even if the town votes to demolish, the real opportunity in my view, lies in the potential to forge partnerships within the frameworks of local community broadcasting. Especially in the case of Harpswell as they're one of the few public access stations who actually transmit their own signal (as opposed to running a community bulletin board through the local Cable Provider). For one thing, there's probably nobody more knowledgable about how local geography impacts broadcast frequencies etc... But most importantly in the case of Maine, the community broadcasters have been leading the fight to defend public airwaves from monopolization, and anyone involved seems to be an expert in FCC regulatory law. While I can claim no such knowledge, the community wireless movement appears to be a natural evolution of the same local institutions.</div>
<div><br></div><div> So thats where we stand at present and things finally look to be coming together, Besides the more technical questions I will comment on separately, I had some general questions concerning range testing and community broadcasting frameworks. Are there any tools or formulas available to help estimate what the possible range of a Ubiquity Bullet set up on the watertower would be? The attached .kmz file should include the precise geocoordinates and sea-level elevation and I estimate that the tower is another 36 meters above ground level. You can also clearly see the tower from Google street view if anyone wants to take a look. It would be great if I could put together a visual approximation of what we could reach from the water tower vs. another location.</div>
<div> Also, are there any other use-cases where Community TV-Radio has embraced WiFi within their existing framework? What are some possibilities for further collaboration? I've mentioned the exciting work being done in the field of Software Defined Radio and the <a href="http://www.rtl-sdr.com/">RTL-SDR</a> hacks. How could we use low-cost, open source tools to combine the knowledge of the analog radio community (HAM Radio, public access etc...) with the civic hacking community?</div>
</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 12:11 PM, Georgia Bullen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:georgia@opentechinstitute.org" target="_blank">georgia@opentechinstitute.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">Hi Andrew!<div><br></div><div>I think the most up to date instructions are here: <a href="https://commotionwireless.net/docs/cck/installing-configuring/install-and-recover-tftp/" target="_blank">https://commotionwireless.net/docs/cck/installing-configuring/install-and-recover-tftp/</a></div>
<div><br></div><div>You might also try following the Commotion 1.1 Upgrade guide that's here on the wiki: <a href="https://wiki.commotionwireless.net/doku.php/general_resources/documentation/router/upgrading_from_previous_versions" target="_blank">https://wiki.commotionwireless.net/doku.php/general_resources/documentation/router/upgrading_from_previous_versions</a></div>
<div><br></div><div>Let us know if that helps!</div><div><br></div><div>-Georgia</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div><div class="h5">On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 12:00 PM, Andrew Jawitz <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ajawitz@codeforamerica.org" target="_blank">ajawitz@codeforamerica.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
</div></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div class="h5"><div dir="ltr">Hello All,<div> I have a really important meeting today where I was hoping to Demo some of the Ubiquiti routers I have running Commotion. I have a Bullet, Pico and Nano of which all were flashed with Commotion Developer Release 2 dr2. I wanted to upgrade today before the demo, however I'm having the same problem on all devices where I can't get past a certain point on the configuration page. </div>
<div> I'm able to pull up the landing page easily by looking up the DHCP ip address on my home router (which is running Advanced Tomato). Typing the ip address in the URL brings me to the Luci admin screen from which the only link that seems to work is "Local Applications". I managed to get into the Admin sign-in by inputing the ------/cgi-bin/luci/admin address manually and eliminating the last backslash. >From here I'm able to login using my password and it brings me to the Configuration dialog. I can save and apply using the dialog but anything else just seems to time out. Even when I try the manual URL method as before. Any idea whats going wrong? As I mentioned before, I have them connected to my router which is running Advanced Tomato and may have some custom settings tripping it up somewhere. Still its strange that it lets me get this far but no further... On the other hand, if anyone is familiar with Tomato, its possible I may be able to tweak something on the router end if that turns out to be the issue.</div>
<div> Otherwise, can anybody point me to the most recent instructions for resetting via TFTP?</div></div>
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<br></blockquote></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr">Georgia Bullen<div>Field Operations Technologist</div><div><a href="http://oti.newamerica.org/" target="_blank">Open Technology Institute</a> @ <a href="http://newamerica.org" target="_blank">New America</a></div>
<div><a href="http://twitter.com/georgiamoon" target="_blank">@georgiamoon</a></div></div>
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