Running Serval in the Core Network Simulator
I've just been visiting the NICER project folks in Darmstadt and Marburg in Germany, where they are starting to use Serval for various parts of their research. They have a really nice approach to the...
View ArticleTP-Link Firmware Lockdown and Alternative (Better!) Hardware for Mesh Extenders
TP-LINK are starting to lock down the firmware on their routers. This is a bad idea, because it means that there will be more and more routers out there that have horribly out of date and vulnerable...
View ArticleSuccinct Data pilot in Fiji
While we have been quiet lately, we haven't been idle. Quite the opposite. The last few weeks we have been working on getting Succinct Data operationally ready for use by NZ Red Cross, which we have...
View Article... and Serval is a first-round winner of the Pacific Humanitarian Challenge
See: http://pacifichumanitarianchallenge.org/announcing-top-10-first-round-winnersThis is a challenge posed by AusAID, the Australian International Aid agency to help Pacific Nations following disaster...
View ArticleMaking self-updating APKs
Serval Mesh is designed to operate without infrastructure. This makes over-the-air updates for it "interesting," because we cannot rely on the internet and Google Play being available, either because...
View ArticlePacific Pilot is Go!
[Deutsch unten]The announcement was made today by the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, that together with our long-time partners in New Zealand Red Cross, and our collaborators in...
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The Australian Prime Minister used Serval this morning
Today we had a surprise visit from our Prime Minister to the University to make some announcements of local importance in the lead up to the election. He also made a brief tour of a couple of research...
View ArticleServal Mesh 0.93 Released
After much too long, the next official release of the Serval Mesh app for Android has been released on Google Play.This includes many, many bug fixes incorporated during that time, and also the...
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Mesh Extenders for the Pacific
Recently we were named a winner in the Pacific Humanitarian Challenge, receiving a grant from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs to undertake a pilot of the Serval Mesh in one or more Pacific...
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Rhizome over ad-hoc UHF is FINALLY working
As many of you will already know, we have been working away in the background on getting the RFD900 radios working in something that approximates ad-hoc mode on Wi-Fi, but using the ISM 915 MHz band,...
View ArticleMeshMS over 4km via UHF
Another short post as I try to get on top of everything at the moment to say that on our last trip to Arkaroola we successfully tested the UHF packet radio functionality over a distance of about 4km....
View ArticleMesh Extender Mark-II design progress
Again a rather short post, just to say that we are working with our contractors on the PCB and case design for the new generation of Mesh Extender prototypes that we will use in the Pacific next year,...
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Prototype replica bush-telegraph insulators
A little side project we have been looking at is using Serval to support tourism activities in regional and remote Australia. The idea is that we want to create infrastructure-independent...
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Bridging Rhizome over HF
I'm currently up at Pacific Endeavour in Brisbane, which is a multi-national defence and civilian humanitarian and disaster response interoperability exercise, attended by, among others, the military...
View ArticleExploring the legal situation of disaster communications networks
I'm currently based in Darmstadt, Germany for a few months with the nice folks in the Secure Mobile Communications laboratory (SEEMOO) at TU-Darmstadt.One of the main things that we are looking at...
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The new Mesh Extender Prototypes have arrived!
After DHL claiming that they couldn't deliver the parcel to our address here in Germany for "technical reasons," we finally have the two prototypes of the new Mesh Extender design.As a reminder, this...
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More details about the Mesh Extender prototype PCBs
I have been asked if I can share the current design documents for the Mesh Extender prototypes, which of course I am happy to do. I have also confirmed with RF Design who are our PCB design partners...
View ArticleOpenWRT doesn't see packages from custom feed
Just a quick post to document a problem we encountered with adding a feed to an OpenWRT build process for the Serval Mesh Extender, and how we fixed it.We followed the process in...
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Mesh Extender 2.0 second revision prototype boards
The second revision of the Mesh Extender 2.0 (ME2.0) PCBs have arrived. These were manufactured at almost miraculous speed by RF Design ahead of the Christmas break. They contain fixes for three of...
View ArticleTesting the Super-Capacitor
We have included a 1F 5.5V super-capacitor on the new Mesh Extender board. The idea of this is so that when power is lost, the unit has a couple of seconds to stop writing to the microSD card, and...
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