I just noticed an very slick way how to make OLSR into a hybrid mesh protocol. Hybrid in the sense: the best of two worlds - on the one hand MOTEs and sensor network nodes which use almost no power at all and on the other hand the high bandwidth / high mobility / highly scalable wifi ad-hoc mesh networks nodes (where OLSR is usually employed).

Like all very important scientific discoveries - this happened by accident :)

I was running wireshark on my PC and wanted to see what kind of strange traffic I can see in the office (*cough*cough*)
Much to my surprise there were OLSR packets in the captured file. This struck me as quite strange since I don't know of any device here which has OLSR running.
So I was searching for the device with IP addr. 10.0.0.132.

Funny enough the OLSR packets stopped. Nothing. Can't ssh into 10.0.0.32. ping does not react anymore. nmap -O did not tell me what type of OS it had.
Half an hour later I hear a "beep beep" from my iPhone which alarmed me to do something serious (instead of writing this text now)
And sure enough the OLSR packets arrived again!! My iPhone had woken up and olsrd resumed working flawlessly!

Hence: send your iPhone an SMS in case you want to activate it as OLSR mesh router ;-)

thenextlayer.org, a plattform for arts, politics, free and open source software and peer based commons production has a nice article about how they used OLSR in the Hivenetworks setup in Southampton, London. Hivenetworks is used to transmitt "hidden stories" about "stories from Southamptons Oral History Archive selected and arranged to correspond with the location of the 10 nodes". That means you get streamed stories about a certain place's past via FM radio receiver.
The content is streamed digitally from the OLSR mesh boxes via mini FM radio transmitter. The transmitters have a very short range and thus are not interfering with real radio stations.

Nice creative work! :)

Top of tree has been tagged to OLSRD_0_5_6_RC1.

source tarballs can be downloaded at:

http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.5/olsrd-0.5.6-rc1.tar.bz2
MD5 49d55a68d1b2b2ac040f4c4df179ba69

http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.5/olsrd-0.5.6-rc1.tar.gz
MD5 d5161c51b8a3c75a1f19db1ff86c2e67

i am asking now the package maintainers to download, compile and test
on their target system and provide feedback (both positive and negative
feedback is welcome).

tentative release target for 0.5.6 will be May 10th.

There is a nice new small feature in olsrd: keeping the routes to a default gateway sticky.

Now, what do we mean by that?

Imagine you are running a mesh network with private IPs (192.168.x.x) and this network has multiple gateways. For example you share many DSL uplinks.
There is a well known problem with olsrd in these settings: if one route to a gateway becomes better than the previous route to a different gateway, then the route will switch.
This is a bit of a problem if the gateways NAT for you. In other words: your downloads will suddenly stop.

olsrd runs on the Classmate. Of course it is just a matter of compiling for 32 bit Intel CPUs and off you go! The Classmate does not come with mesh by default as compared to the OLPC's XO. So this is an easy way of adding mesh support. Same goes for the Asus Eee PC. In fact the machines are very very similar. You can use Asus's SDK to compile it.

The crew from FunkFeuer Weinviertel ported olsrd to the iPhone.
You can get it from the download area. However you still need a working olsrd.conf file. Start it via
olsrd -f $conffile -i en0 -d 0
A nice UI is still missing! Feel like making one?

fixed point math seems to run. On a standard WRT (Mips, 200Mhz) it saves
around 50%. On my PC (which has a modern FPU supported based CPU) it saves
nothing (that can be measured currently)

Fixed point math replaces floating point calculations by integer counterparts.
The 20 higher bits of a typical 32 bit hold the digits before the decimal
point > 1.0, the lower 12 bits hold the digits after the decimal point. An
old trick, e.g. use in gaming to speed up calculations, because long (+-*/)
long is always faster than float (+-*/). Of course, all calculations and
automatic number conversions have to be found and adapted.

Top of tree has been tagged (in both Mercurial and CVS) to OLSRD_0_5_5.

source tarballs can be downloaded at:

http://olsrd.sourceforge.net/hg/olsrd/archive/a5b9cf969979.tar.bz2
MD5 bd1cd216c318c1359ab6e832adbb1962

http://olsrd.sourceforge.net/hg/olsrd/archive/a5b9cf969979.tar.gz
MD5 6dff6fd66c70729bc3c5bee7a4c58803

note that this is the last release that is both in CVS and Mercurial SCM.

In the future we will only develop based on Mercurial and turn off the
CVS server in a couple of days.

See http://www.olsr.org/?q=mercurial for using Mercurial.

Talk material is at:

http://www.olsr.org/~hannes/olsr-ng-v2.pdf
http://www.olsr.org/~hannes/olsr-ng.mp3

Top of tree has been tagged (in both Mercurial and CVS) to OLSRD_0_5_5_RC1.

source tarballs can be downloaded at:

http://olsrd.sourceforge.net/hg/olsrd/archive/9a623d791e69.tar.bz2
MD5 b1fab6fc6bf7337fa672ad28a72402e2

http://olsrd.sourceforge.net/hg/olsrd/archive/9a623d791e69.tar.gz
MD5 54b3ee99fbebc4ee58cc3b140a9b1946