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by fubu 4282 days ago
I've actually been playing around with a local network consisting of a single wifi router attached to an old netbook as a server. Have you considered attaching an off the self wifi router attached to an external battery pack?

There are economies of scale on external battery packs that run 12v(common wifi router DC voltage) and marine batteries also can run 12v. You could create a new power cable that never does the dc to ac conversion and use that battery pack for the wifi. Then you could run the raspberry pi or other system as the server itself.

Nice idea and don't worry about the Africa haters. Plenty of stuff is originally made for mid 20s SF techies that ends up being useful for a whole lot of other people.
2 comments
keenerd 4282 days ago
> Then you could run the raspberry pi or other system as the server itself.

Or use the router as the server too. A $50 router will have a USB port (higher quality than the RPi's) and a 500MHz MIPS cpu that is not too far behind the antiquated ARMv6 core in the Pi.

I've done a little similar work with using routers off-grid: http://kmkeen.com/chatbox/

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cbolton97 4282 days ago
Thanks for the tip! Exactly the info we were looking for when we posted on HN :)
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fubu 4282 days ago
Great to hear. I haven't looked into the project fully, so I'll apologize in advance if you already have a solution for what I describe below.

I used a catch all DNS wildcard with a dnsmasq rule which I set up on a DD-WRT flashed router.

address=/#/192.168.11.2

That IP was the IP of my server. The nice part of that rule is that many people will type in google.com or something similar when they find your open wifi spot assuming they are connected to the web. The wildcard will resolve that the the IP of the local server and send them there automatically. That can be the landing page of the network that introduces things, provides links etc.

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MichaelAO 4282 days ago
We ended up using an mDNS (http://www.avahi.org/) that pointed towards hostname.local - not perfect, but we didn't have to use the IP address anymore. The catch all is a much better idea.
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