Hey all,
Over the weekend a team consisting of Tatenda Chipeperekwa, Veenesh Jeena, Zaheer Abrahams from the UCT Honors program as well as YoursTruly succeeded in writing an App which allows anyone with a rooted Android handset to connect to a B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh network.
Work began on Saturday morning by bringing up a simple mesh testbed consisting of a Mesh Potato, an Ubiquity NS2 and a Linksys WRT54GL. The rest of the day was spent manually configuring the test phones into AdHoc mode and bringing the batmand mesh routing daemon up on both a HTC Magic & a HTC Legend.
congratulations to all involved for the success of this project! It makes me happy seeing people coming together to work on a project, especially when it is about batman. ;)
I experimented with mesh on the phones / mobile devices myself not so long ago and noticed that the energy consumption is pretty high. Even if we had no mesh the ad-hoc mode does not allow to save as much energy as the managed mode. Did you notice the same thing ? How long does the battery last ?
In an environment which provides a "backbone" network (e.g. routers) batman- adv might be more suitable, since the clients do not need any mesh software nor ad-hoc mode and still can roam around. Did you give it a try ?
Regards, Marek