I've had a few people now download and flash Lancaster Mesh firmware who are nowhere near Lancaster (UK). There is no access to the router once you have put the Lancaster Mesh firmware on it. This firmware is designed purely for use in and around Lancaster with no user configurable options except for claiming ownership of the node and setting you longitude and latitude.

If you wish to look at how it works, or make your own version of the firmware, you must be familiar with OpenWRT and be able to build your own firmware. There is some documentation available with instructions for creating your own firmware but I recommend practicing first with a standard OpenWRT build. If you are confident enough to do this and are around the Lancaster area, I will gladly provide as much help as I can (and the WEP key for joining the Lancaster Mesh!). If you are looking to build a similar project in a different area I will also gladly help you in designing a custom firmware for your project and will definately be interested in any ideas you have for adding features!

I will not reveal the standard root password for security reasons. If you have flashed this firmware by accident boot_wait is turned on by default so it should be possible to simply tftp a new firmware back onto the router using the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki

I'm sorry if you have installed this firmware by accident and are unable to re-flash the router with a usable image, but this is a project for Lancaster, UK, and I am unable to help much with problems like that. The best place to ask is the OpenWRT forums for help with re-flashing and/or de-bricking your router.

Thanks,

Darren.

Welcome to LancasterMesh. An attempt at providing a cheap, resilient community wireless network to Lancaster.

We aim to provide a wireless cloud across the roofs of Lancaster, allowing anyone to join the network and become a node themselves. Nodes can either be simple repeaters, extending the range of the mesh, or gateway nodes giving the mesh a connection into the internet. With this wireless community mesh network things such as mobile hotspots and remote access are possible where no traditional wired access is available.

The hardware used is intended to be cheap and readily available. To this end Lancaster Mesh is using standard off the shelf wireless routers such as the Linksys WRT54G. Using this standard equipment along with an opensource firmware called OpenWRT, a node can be quickly built and put into play. These however, are not the only devices that can be used. Any old PC with a supported wireless card can be changed into a node using a bootable CD - it won't even overwrite any operating system on the hard drive. In fact a hard drive need not be installed in the PC. For more information on both of these, check the Documents section.

We have looked at a few different meshing systems before settling on the current one. Most are very good, but none of the ready available systems were quite what we were looking for. Ideally we wanted a totally self contained auto configuring system. To this end we have developed a custom firmware from OpenWRT and a custom bootable CD based on Linux. Both of these will have a version of OLSR installed which is a dynamic routing implementation. This turns a piece of hardware into a black box node system that should be just a simple plug and play. This is currently still in development and will either use a central database to manage the nodes, or IPv6 to ensure each node has a unique address. If you want to help in the development, please drop me a line at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ! Keep an eye on the News and Downloads sections for future developments.