Mesh Extender assembly

Following our crowd-funding campaign we have funds to build a number more mesh extenders, and get them out to some early adopters as well as to NZ Red Cross.  So the last few days have been a bit of a production line while we get the hardware assembled.

The worst part of the assembly is getting the lids of the MR3020 routers, which left me with a broken pocket knife and sore fingers for a couple of days.  Basically the lids are cemented to the main body of the case, and you have to break each point of cemented bond, without breaking the lid.  Some are much easier than others, depending, presumably, on the amount of cement used.  We had one lid cracked out of the ten units made.

Then it was soldering the radios and router PCBs together:

The cases are down with the engineering workshop services to get the holes drilled for the radio connectors, and some of the internal ribbing ground off so that the radio can sit flush with the inside of the case.

Otherwise, it has been teaching, and sorting out some of the local tax arrangements for the contributions from Australians in our crowd funding campaign.  If you put an Australian shipping address and requested a perk, then you will get a GST-inclusive tax invoice.  We won't be out of pocket with GST, because we budgeted for it, and also the GST on all the hardware will more than make up for the GST we have to pay on Australian contributions.

Our focus is now on fixing a couple of late issues with the mesh extender firmware so that it works at least for meshms over UHF radio.  Optimising the throughput for larger files will happen overtime, and be delivered as over-the-mesh updates.