Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Mesh 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, and likely in a variety of other places as well.

Together with everything else, this has me rather busy at the moment, so apologies for the lack of pictures and detailed information just yet.

Hopefully in a couple of weeks I will be able to share some of our design notes, to give you an idea of what we are hoping to build.

One big challenge is to make something that is both cheap, and sufficiently rugged to endure tropical maritime conditions in the pacific, and the boiling hot / freezing cold and very dusty conditions of the Australian Outback.

Another challenge is working around the short-comings of the USB mass storage capability of the Atheros 9311 SoC, for devices like the Mesh Extender, where power could be cut at any moment without notice.  This rather upsets some brands of USB memory sticks, potentially causing them to go read-only forever.

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