So I been trying to put together some demos to show off what AREDN can do to try and drum up interest in the area. I have some hAP AC Lite (x4,) some gl.inet (x2) an some tp-links (cpe210 x2) to kinda test around the house/neighborhood (at this time only the hap have AREDN loaded.)
I went ahead and put a raspberry pi image together with a few basic services like a basic web page. Have 3-4 active nodes in my demo and I can see them as neighbors, I can hit accessed my pi from any node, everything appears working.
For the icing on the cake I had a couple Xbox 360's in the closet from when we use to do lan game nights figured I throw that in the mix. But it doesn't mix very well at all! The consoles can't seam to network together.
I have tried both consoles hardwired (Ethernet) to a single node and this works, so I know it's not broken hardware. I can also hook each console up to an individual node (lan port 2) an then use a third Ethernet cable to bridge the 2 nodes (using lan port 3 on each node) and this works fine. However strictly using node A to link with node B over the mesh I get nothing.
All nodes in this demo are hAP AC Lite's on 2.4 GHz channel -2. One thing I kinda got to work was setting the channel to a non ham bands (channel 9 as the console can not see the negative channels) on the nodes and then connected the Xboxes wirelessly to the hAP AC Lite's. With this demo, though, the nodes are in the same house so I really can't tell for sure if it is a mesh connection due to the close proximity. I unpluged each node one at a time to see if the link was broken and everything seamed ok.
I know this is not a common or intended use for AREDN but I really think showing a common device/use may really be of interest to the small group I will be showing. Does this come off as impractical something that may not work? Or should I look to other "fun" uses the project could be used for?
Joe AE6XE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_in_IP
This is what ampr.net is doing with ipip protocols across the internet. I've not looked into this, but you might be able to take a Mikrotik RouterOS or other very smart switch, and configure it such that on one port, a LAN IP address is received from and it is on a mesh node. Then you allocate the other ports to be this virtual gaming LAN. There would be 2 of these specially configured switches across the mesh network. These switches would create an ipip tunnel between each other with a common, e.g. 172.16.x.x/28 network riding on top of this ipip tunnel across the mesh network. It would act as if the same LAN for all the devices on both ends, subject to the performance of the packets traversing the mesh network.
Joe AE6XE