Thanks to Freddy W4WFC and Jeff KG4IKT, we now have our first educational facility on the air! Cannon Co. High School in Woodbury TN has a 5Ghz Nanstation M5 XW shooting 5.5 Miles to our Short Mountain site with a great signal -72/-95/23 db and 24.3 MBps @ 10Mhz bandwidth. There may be a little antenna aiming yet to be done, but it is a great start. Just discussing with Freddy, now that we got it... what do we do with it? I rattled off about 15 things right off hand for them to consider. Not to mention the public safety implications and possibilities should the school have to be used for an emergency shelter.
Does anyone else have school installations that they would like to share what they are doing with them?
T.D.
Does anyone else have school installations that they would like to share what they are doing with them?
T.D.
Do you have a camera up on Short Mountain? I'd take a raspberry pi and a $100 hdmi capable flat panel Walmart special TV and put it up on a wall showing the picture from the mountain. The students may not be as interested in the weather conditions, but a live picture they can walk by in a classroom or hallway that shows there is live outside of their valley might be inspiring. (It's one of the reasons why I'm seldom at my desk at work, instead sitting in a large atrium with windows on 2 sides!)
The killer app for the mesh is to provide data/images/etc from a place that doesn't have internet/cell service. I would use the school as a place to receive, not as a source for data.
I'm using this fixed camera: http://amzn.to/2dfrKPx which is $40.
And this as the pan-tilt-zoom one: http://amzn.to/2dj2Mh0 which is $329. That's the POE+ version, so you'll need a $35 injector or you can use the power supply that comes with it...I think that version is $299.
I'm using the PTZ at 720p and 5 fps mainly because the computers we're viewing these streams on are absolute dogs. The best way to view the stream is with the VLC player, but it doesn't include a PTZ controller. VLC will work fine on a pi3.