I'm working with a group of about 50 nodes, 40 of which are physically stationary and 10 are mobile. The area is about three football fields with all the nodes evenly distributed while the 10 move around throughout the whole area (specifically there is one on each machine in the factory and one on each fork truck) with all of the fork truck nodes powered off the network is rock solid, but when they are powered up the network becomes flaky with different machine nodes loosing connection.

My assumption is the machines notice a fork truck nearby and route their traffic through it as would make sense from their algorithm, but when the hilo goes out of range they seem to not notice and packets sent to the out of range nodes are lost.

I looked all over the documentation and haven't found a way to specify which nodes to not allow routes to be built through.

The obvious solution is to have the fork trucks connect to the network as clients, but as I'm using raspberry pis (3 b+ specifically) they only have one wireless adapter, and adding a second adapter to each machine is financially infeasible. I was unable to simply connect to the network and send messages, understandably since the batman system uses specific packets to communicate.

The two solutions I can think of is to find a way to blacklist the mobile nodes to prevent them becoming hops in the network, or manually create the communication packets on the mobile nodes to send and receive messages while ignoring any route creation messages to likewise prevent them becoming hops.

Is there an official way of doing either of these?

Thanks, Jake