Mesh Project

 

Introduction

In the world of today ,meters have built-in modems with sim cards inside which are used to send out the amount of water or electricity usage (depending on the type of meter) to the service provider so that they can keep track of your daily usages and be able to charge you at the end of the agreed period, these modems however, are expensive.

Our objective is to replace those modems with the single board computers running mesh inside because they are cheaper and only one unit must have internet connection so that it can be able to communicate with the service provider.

What is mesh?

In simple terms, mesh is a network infrastructure where nodes connected on the same mesh network are able to exchange information without the use of an internet connection or an ISP involved.

There are various types of mesh networks available on the internet, which are open source and the one we decided to use was the B.A.T.M.A.N-Adv mesh.

B.A.T.M.A.N stands for Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networking' which is a routing protocol in a form of Linux kennel module operating on layer 2.

Compatibility

The Computer boards that I used in this project are the Orange Pi Lite and the Raspberry Pi 3 B+, Orange Pi Zero and the Orange Pi 2G Iot were also used for testing in this project but the results were unsuccessful due to various reasons.

I used Armbian stretch on the Orange Pi Lite and Raspbian Stretch Lite on the Raspberry Pi 3 B+, below are the links of the operating systems used on the computer boards available for download.

Orange Pi Lite: https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-lite/

Raspberry Pi 3 B+: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/  

After downloading the operating system, you will need an SD Card on each computer board which will be used to boot the devices, but first you will need to flash the Operating system onto the SD card.

Flashing tool is available for download at https://www.balena.io/etcher/ .

A terminal Emulator software will also be required so that you can be able to boot the computer boards and be able to log in, either with SSH or Serial port ,in this case I used the serial port because it?s easy to set up while SSH requires you to know the IP address of the computer board before you can be able to log in and for the serial port you will need an RS232 USB to TTL cable,the baud rate of the ORANGE PI LITE is 115200 and for the RASPBERRY PI 3B+ the baud rate can be left at the default 9600.

The terminal software used is available for download at https://www.putty.org/  

Testing and Configurations

Below are two experiments, with mesh configurations that were performed in order to test whether the computer boards could communicate with each other or not.

N:B  Please use the Ethernet port for any internet updates required, avoid using the Wi-Fi.

Experiment 1: http://www.pnpscada.com/wiki/Exp01-%20BATMAN-adv%20mesh%20Raspberry%20Pi%203%20B+%20Not%20Using%20External%20Router.pdf

Experiment 2: http://www.pnpscada.com/wiki/Exp02-%20BATMAN-adv%20mesh%20Raspberry%20Pi%203%20B+,%20Testing%20connection%20between%20unit%201%20and%203%20through%20unit%202.pdf

 Wiki by Itumeleng Ndala