Group Meeting - Mobile Access Points

Today's group meeting was mostly about our mobile access nodes. The platform for the mobile nodes is the Soekris Net4801 embedded system. They are low-power, compact, integrated computer systems, including 128 Mbyte SDRAM, 266Mhz 586 clone, CF interface, 44 pin UltraDMA IDE, 3 10/100 ethernet ports, a DB9 serial port, a Mini-PCI type III socket, and a PCI connector... among a few other things that don't have headers (USB 1.1).

We got these things running by booting from the CF card, then installing some stripped version of Debian from it to the laptop drive that we installed. It seemed pretty straight forward. It would probably be better to do a network install for these things (easier to mass produce them.)

If we needed to clone four or five units, we should probably use ghost, blast, ghost, dd, or whatever the kids are doing now-days. There are 44pin-40pin IDE adaptors (myCableshop, Tiger Direct) to allow the drives to attach to a standard PC.

Some other guy has a site about running Debian on Soekris systems. It's different from ours, but you might want to read it.

The second half of the meeting was about Crossbow wireless sensor networks. The sensors form themselves into a routing tree rooted at a base station. They go into activity / hibernation cycles and relay data through the tree back to the base station. The idea is to make the base station a DTN AP and relay the data through our system. The sensors run TinyOS (SourceForge) and are programmed through NesC. NesC is a component based language. It centres around modules which connect together through interfaces. The interfaces are composed of commands (inbound) and events (outbound).