@awilfox you dont want anything more than mesh networking

@awilfox the most costly thing is batteries

@awilfox most people have phones, you enable them to use phones to talk within the mesh even w/ cell jamming they're starting to deploy, and you have a route out as long as SOMEONE has a route out

@nire I wasn't aware that phones were capable of connecting to mesh networks; in that case, that's great!

@awilfox the outside facing nodes for most of them are basically just adhoc wifi connections

@awilfox the routing is handled within the mesh

@awilfox at least that was my understanding of the current leading-edge ones, but that project may have never panned out

@nire I've only used really primitive ones that were one step above QAM-over-ham, to be fair. There could be a whole new generation of protocols since I was twiddling.

@nire @awilfox For batteries look at 1S LiPo batteries for things like remote control cars/planes/boats/quadcopters

The Pi Zero W will draw a max of somewhere under 300mA so depending on how long you want them active (I'd go for at least 10 hours personally) you should be able to find some cheapish ones

@troubleMoney @awilfox lipo is incredibly suboptimal because of two things, it xrays as the same density and look of molded c4, and it has a tendency to light on fire when kept in enclosed spaces while being used

@nire @troubleMoney does it even need to be rechargable? I mean, NiCad might work okay, but I'm wondering if you could get away with a coin cell or AAAs.

@awilfox @troubleMoney not for powering wifi that long. rechargable is better just because of energy density per unit volume after a point

@nire @awilfox Ah, wasn't aware x-ray detection was in your threat model for this.

Hang on, you're expecting people to be using phones to access this right? You've got a battery right there, just grab power from the phone and have the Pi Zero as a sort of phone case.

You might be able to camouflage it as one of those battery extender cases as well

@troubleMoney @awilfox so two things, one is they arent nec. connected to people with phones, and two, my threat model is 'have nothing cops can use to escallate charges out of ignorance or feigned ignorance', so it xraying as that is just part of that

@awilfox @troubleMoney (also lipo batteries dont take impacts very well, which, well, they'll be in bags on people who might get thrown around a lot, and your bag lighting on fire in their car ALSO is a reason to escallate charges)

@nire @awilfox Full stealth job then, preferably nothing on anyone in the area.

Does the mesh have to be mobile or can it be comprised of stationary gear that blends in to the environment?

Also are there likely to be any handy locations to set longer range gear?

@troubleMoney @awilfox no you misunderstand

it existing is fine

it having lipo batteries is a shitty idea

@nire @awilfox I'd hazard a guess that if they're going to take exception to common batteries then they'll probably pick up on the raspberry pis that a bunch of people seem to have

@troubleMoney @awilfox yeah, the difference is that there have been cases of them escallating for robot/drone batteries becaues they ~*~resemble explosives~*~ around here. I get that you're trying to do a thing but you're completely misunderstanding like, half the points that i've been spelling out

@nire @awilfox Ah shit, now I get it. Not entirely sure how someone can be creatively ignorant to the point where a battery looks like a bomb but I guess they found a way

@troubleMoney @awilfox so the thing is lithium polymer batteries are a larger subset and things generally referred to as lithium polymer, which i assumed you were using, are the ones w/ soft shells and squishy insides, and prone to overcharge/overdischarge because, well, they're cheap, but even cheap Li-Ion batteries usually have charging circuitry

@awilfox @troubleMoney and are uh, actually impact resistant

@nire @awilfox I was considering that as a packaging issue rather than a reason to rule them out completely but those are really good reasons

@troubleMoney @awilfox yeah sorry for the misunderstanding, i realised that it might be regional that li-po is specifically the squishy, dangerous, firey ones <_<

@nire @awilfox No worries, your threat model is something that I haven't dealt with before

I was thinking put the whole shebang in a solid project case, that way they won't look and think "SHIT WIRES AND CIRCUITRY" and it'd provide protection to the batteries. Would fix the delicacy problems but not x-ray. Unless you line the entire thing with tinfoil but that would look even worse to them

@troubleMoney @awilfox lmao

@nire @awilfox Hang on, could they by any chance creatively mistake a commercially sold usb power bank for phones as anything sinister?

'cause those are dead cheap, have all the charging circuitry, have decent batteries, and provide the right sort of power

@troubleMoney @nire @awilfox

RPi, "normal" looking USB power pack and a "wifi adapter type gadget" aren't especially unusual or suspicious for a person to be carrying around with them; depending on how smart cops are could be explained away as "music player for portable sound system"/ "college project you happened to still have in your bag".

Whereas drone batteries, "home brew" circuit boards etc *are* more likely to arouse suspicion..

@vfrmedia @nire @awilfox Honestly I was kinda caught up in the "let's make stuff" wheel reinvention party that is every RPi project idea when I should have been thinking of the really fucking obvious

@awilfox @nire @vfrmedia Right, in some attempt to be actually useful, for sourcing things take a look at aliexpress, they're the cheapest place I've found for phone battery charger things and stuff like that.

Also go for the Pi Zero W, it's really damn hard to find a wifi dongle that's any decent for less than 5 bucks

@troubleMoney I feel like you may be misunderstanding @nire.

LiPo batteries that are available to makers and enthusiasts are NOT the same quality as Apple or Sony batteries. They are much more fragile.

They are much more likely to turn into incendiary devices on their own, just from normal use. And they *look* like one to the untrained eye.

That can be dangerous when the authorities already want a reason to get rid of you.

@awilfox also those are lithium ion

@awilfox lipo are those but in soft-bag shells, which is, yes.

@geekylou right , thats the plan + 10$ of battery

@drcable @katastrophe i am unsurprised, somehow

@PoliticalVoyeur how much do you know about mesh networking?

@nire Less than nothing haha

@PoliticalVoyeur ok so: they're basically if your wifi device were to connect to other devices through their wifi, except infrastructure to extend that across arbitrary many hops

@PoliticalVoyeur and they do the routing between themselves automatically, so everyone within range of a node of the network thats in range of another node of the network, has access to any of the linked nodes

@PoliticalVoyeur it works kind of like how local firechat works, except harder for cops to just arbitrarily log into

@PoliticalVoyeur but also gives you 3g/wifi connections within range of any of the nodes,allowing the whole network to (slowly) use connections outside of it, and you could probably give priority to, say, livestreams. the main use i was thinking of is both anonymization (it would basically be black bloc for data if you dont keep the logs, other than the exit nodes which could easily be a starbucks wifi hotspot) and for when cell+4g jamming gets used like they've said they're gonna start doign

@PoliticalVoyeur i dont know MUCH about the current generation of things, but you could probably do it for 20$ per node, maybe a bit more if the range sucks and you want to craft external antennae. raspberry pi zero W (comes w/ built-in wifi), USB battery pack, fits in a bag, used enough in projects that it wouldnt seem that suspicous

@nire @PoliticalVoyeur Pi 0 also needs an SD card for booting.

CHiP has BT/Wifi, doesn't need SD card, is $10.

@ajr @PoliticalVoyeur CHiP is less friendly for people not used to computers, though

@nire @PoliticalVoyeur Sure. That's true.

@ajr @PoliticalVoyeur the thing about mesh stuff is even if you arent using it for like, activisty stuff, the best usecase is the one where anyone who is willing to add to the mesh just, can

@PoliticalVoyeur @ajr (and most of the mesh networking stuff right now is aimed at rpi hardware anyway)

@nire @PoliticalVoyeur I think it is a cool idea. How would you get the phones on it? The only methods I know are either creating microcells with routing or use wifi.

I know more about wiki but that would either have a ton of SSIDs or everything jumping on well-known ones like openwireless.org, right?

It looks like people have made GSM microcells using Pis, that might be an optino.

@ajr yeah, which is why im mostly trying to just get people talking about it again (locally, initially, but people seem to be interested here too)

@nire My thought was that we should be setting up wireless, long range connections. Local BBS kind of thing.

We were trying to do a device agnostic, hub and spoke topology. It died on the vine.

@ajr yeah so theres like, hyperborea that tried to make a city wide one (and pittsburgh actually has one, i think)

@ajr where the starting points for hyperborea was long point to point links hoping the mesh would get filled out and they wouldnt need them anymore, but the problem is you really want to grow it radially

@ajr this is why what i really want is things that are able to charge off of being situated under overhead power lines

@ajr so you can just bury them or bolt them to the underside of furniture etc

@nire So many of the mesh networking projects appear to be dead. I was trying to get back in to it a few months ago, and all the sites were full of dead links, and outdated info.

Made me super confused and also paranoid?

@ajr the tools arent but the bundles are, as far as i can tell?

@ajr but political stuff has had people burned out and all the data anarchists are busy being real anarchists. I dont think its like, a coordinated campeign against mesh networking as much as everyone is sorta under attack or defending those who are, lately

@ajr 'real' here was a joke, i just mean in physical space.

@nire Yeah, it was just the higher profile projects that were dead.

@ajr much like all of open source people getting bored is also a big issue

@loam it also costs 30$ more than an rpi 0-w and i can almost guarantee you you get a better battery for 30$ than the mr3040 gets

@loam (also i think better specs iirc)

@nire hmm yeah it's definitely more expensive than i remembered it being. i thought it was more like $25...

@loam i think its out of production now

@nire ah, oh well then

@nire what is the raspi 0 situation now btw? i haven't looked in a while but i remember them being all outta stock..

@loam they released a new one with wifi

@nire oh damb. a zero with wifi! that changes things yeah

@bil yeah, but the phone meshnets are less useful for opsec reasons

@bil since,unless there are ones i forgot about, most are about creating one, not restricting one

@bil (people have observed cops using the ones that are for chatting, at the very least)

@nire so how would using a raspi be any different? unless you are going to develop your own protocol they could use their own pi to listen in. To ensure privacy you need to use mesh and encryption, so you need to exchange keys and establish trust. the key exchange is the tricky part.

@bil most of them have at least credentialed login + no need for usernames tied to the phone like a lot of the other things i've seen do

@nire have you looked at http://servalproject.org/ it does encrypted transmission, and seems to work with existing apps. looks like a creative commons license, so your could do your own code review, or contribute.