Sponsored By
Efika 5200B Project
Search & Rescue Portable Radio (Updated 15-Aug-2006)in category Hardware
proposed by spyke555 on 29th June 2006 (accepted on 7th September 2006)
Project Summary
One big problem during SAR missions is reliable commications in difficult terrain. The combination of VoIP technology, high power 802.11 cards, and AODV or similar MESH routing techniques would make for a very interesting option to exsiting technologies.Using MESH routing, each team\'s radio becomes a repeater and the communications can then be automaticaly routed to all radios within the mesh. Additional rados can be deployed to cover \"dead\" zones as needed if a team is far from the others.
In addition to this, situational awareness is paramount during SAR missions. Being able to connect a GPS to a radio, or better yet integrating the GPS into the radio, would allow the command post to know the possition of all teams in real time.
I have been looking for a cost effective hardware platform to fulfill this need for a few months now and have been very interested in the MCP5200 processor. My initial set of requirements:
- Audio input and output for voice communications
- PCI interface to attach current 802.11 mini-PCI boards
- Serial port interface to allow external GPS connections
- USB port for application update
- Ethernet port for development / configuration
- Small form factor for portable use
The EFIKA platform fulfills this need perfectly.
From a software perspective I am targetting the following at the moment:
- Linux operating system (disto to be determined)
- RAT multicast audio conferencing application
- UoB JAdhoc AODV implementation
Some details still remain to be determined such as user interface type and the like, but most of these will be easily determined once the target platform details are known.
Project Update - 14-July-2006
Testing with RAT has been very promissing, looks like a good choice.
Testing of UoB JAdhoc has been less than stellar. Also AODV\'s on demand routing means that some network trafic gets lost during route discovery (on Win32 platforms at least). So have started to look into OLSR routing, and initial tests are very promissing. Plus the OLSRD implementation allows for plug-in development, which holds some interesting possibilities.
Project Update - 15-Aug-2006
RAT and OLSR integration complete. I\'ve confirmed that this application will not need X or Java to operate, which will make for a nice small installation that will lend itself well to a solid state disk.
Now moving on to development of the front end application, that will allow user to accomplish simple tasks such as signal strength display, volume control, channel selection, etc.
Project Blog Entries
Some concerns were raised with the use of 2.4 GHz signals in wilderness type environments. Foliage and the lack of direct line of sight are all very real concerns that this project must overcome.
Ubiquity has a Super Range 9 mini-PCI card that should help to resolve many of these issues. The card operates at 900MHz and provides 700mW of output power. These two elements combined should provide a much more efficient communications link between nodes.
Work continues...