[MLB-WIRELESS] MelbourneWireless Router Project

[Dan Flett]

>Where do I signup ?

I'm planning to build a few of these units myself.  The sum of the parts 
will cost, at a very rough approximation, between $450 and $500, including 
pigtails but not including other cables, antennas or mast.  I've been 
looking at the cost of setting up a node using various different methods, 
and it turns out that doing it this way (with a WRT54G and another AP in a 
box up a mast) is actually cheaper than putting PCMCIA cradles and wireless 
cards in an old Pentium PC running Linux.

>Or more seriously, as an idiot, I'm happy to test the
>unit/kit to make sure its idiot proof.

Cool.  The hardware and software developments will proceed in a paralell 
manner, but I guess we need some working hardware first before we can 
properly develop idiot-proof software!

The first software package I see being developed is a simple 'master' 
OpenWRT package that downloads and configures other existing OpenWRT 
packages.  This will mostly be command-line driven, but should be pretty 
simple.  Then we can look at modifying or adding to the OpenWRT 
"interface-wrt" web-interface package.  I probably won't be able to do that 
myself too quickly, so I'll be looking for help to do this.

>Happy to buy said unit etc....

Cool!  Happy to sell one to you. :)  My whole motivation for doing this is 
to create a basic "building-block" router for the Melbourne Wireless network 
to make routing on the network easy.  I'm interested in helping to build the 
network, not making money.  So in the short-term I'm not expecting to profit 
in any way from this, and I'll proably never charge a mark-up on any of the 
hardware I sell to community network people.  I may at some point sell it as 
a kit and charge for assembly though.  Assuming it's popular in the first 
place...

Cheers,

Dan



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