/disaster-radio

A (paused) work-in-progress long-range, low-bandwidth wireless disaster recovery mesh network powered by the sun.

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disaster.radio is currently not actively developed and seeks a new maintainer

It is a work-in-progress long-range, low-bandwidth wireless disaster recovery mesh network powered by the sun.

Build Status

Table of contents

Getting Started

The quickest way to get started with disaster.radio is to buy a preinstalled device or

  • Download the latest release
  • Unzip the disaster-radio-0.X.X.zip file
  • Follow the included instructions for flashing it to your device

If you would rather test the latest, cutting-edge developments, you can compile the firmware yourself by cloning this repo and following the initial setup instructions.

Layout and Flow

The Disaster Radio firmware is made up of a single "server" and a number of "clients", as well as "middleware" that sits between the clients and server. These are a"server" and "clients" in the logical, software sense, not a literal, networking sense.

Here are the modules currently implemented with descriptions of their purpose:

  • DisasterServer:

    • DisasterRadio: the main "server" that takes messages from clients and sends them to other clients

  • DisasterClient:

    • LoRaClient: interfaces with LoRaLayer2
    • WebSocketClient: WebSocket connections from the web app
    • StreamClient: for Arduino Stream, currently used for serial console
    • TCPClient: for a telnet-like server
    • HistoryRecord: records messages to SD card (or bounded queue in memory)
    • OLEDClient: displays messages on the screen (mostly for debugging purposes, but eventually I'd like to use this for a mobile Disaster Radio terminal of some kind)
    • GPSClient: proof-of-concept, interfaces with a serial GPS module to beacon your current location periodically

  • DisasterMiddleware:

    • WelcomeMessage: (very simple, in main.cpp) shows a welcome message to clients when they connect
    • HistoryReplay: shows history to clients when they connect
    • Console: implements a simple console with chat (similar to the web app) plus some /commands (I went with a more IRC-like syntax but you could easily implement a getopt version)

  • DisasterHistory:

    • HistorySD: records history to SD card
    • HistoryMemory: records history to a bounded queue in memory (default limit 10 messages)

The server and clients communicate with each other using "datagrams" that include a destination address, a message type, and a message. Read more about the disaster radio networking stack on our wiki, https://github.com/sudomesh/disaster-radio/wiki/Layered-Model.

Hardware Connections

For supported development boards see the Devices & Hardware wiki page.

The pinouts for supported boards can be found in firmware/esp32/config.h.

DIO0 sends an interrupt from the LoRa transceiver upon Tx/Rx Ready on the radio.
Chip selects can be used to explicitly switch between the LoRa tranceiver and the SD card; however, the SD card should be enabled by default, as the LoRa interrupt appears to handle enabling the transceiver (note: this still needs to be thoroughly tested, what happens if you receive an interrupt while loading from the SD?).

Initial Setup with PlatformIO

pip install -U platformio

Edit platformio.ini to suit your needs. If you are flashing a ESP32 LILY TTGO board then you will probably not have to edit anything in platformio.ini but make sure upload_port is set to the correct device which may vary depending on your operating system and which other devices you have connected.

Building firmware

To test that the firmware is compiling correctly without flashing it to a device, run

pio run

This will compile all libraries and main firmware files. The resulting binary is stored as .pio/build/ttgo-lora32-v1/firmware.bin

Flashing firmware

For dev boards

Connect your computer to the board using a usb cable,

In platformio.ini make sure upload_port, upload_speed, etc are correct for your device.

Then run:

pio run -t upload

By default, PlatformIO builds and flashes firmware for the LILY's ESP32 TTGO V2 dev board. If you would like to build for another supported board, select the corresponding build environment. For example to build and flash the firmware and file system for the ESP32 TTG0 V1 board, use the following,

pio run -e ttgo-lora32-v1 -t upload -t uploadfs

Developing firmware

Some useful hints for developing this firmware using platformio are included here,

  • It may be a good idea to delete the libdeps folder prior to rebuilding, as old, out-dated libraries could case conflits. To do this, rm -rf .pio/libdeps.
  • If you would like to make changes to a specific library, such as LoRaLayer2, you can clone the library into the firmware/lib folder that is created after running pio run and then comment it out or remove it from the lib_deps list in the platformio.ini file.

Building Web App

First, build the web app using npm, instructions for can be found in web/README.md.

If you have trouble building the web app with npm, you can download a pre-built version of web app as part of the latest release. Then, copy the files in web/static/ from the zipped release to the web/static/ directory in the cloned repo.

Building and uploading SPIFFS image

Next, build the binary for the SPIFFS and upload it to your board.

To only build:

pio run -t buildfs

To build and upload:

pio run -t uploadfs

If using an SD card, copy the contents of web/static/ to the root of a fat32 formatted SD card, then insert the SD card.

Testing Firmware

Once the firmware and SPIFFS image has been successfully flashed, you can test it by logging into the disaster.radio <node-address> wireless network and navigating to http://192.168.4.1 in a browser to access the demo chat app.

You can also try connecting to the device via serial or telnet with commands like,

pio device monitor

or

telnet 192.168.4.1

After pressing enter once, you should be greeted with a banner and presented with a prompt to enter a nick or send an anonymous message,

     ___              __                            ___    
 ___/ (_)__ ___ ____ / /____ ____      _______ ____/ (_)__ 
/ _  / (_-</ _ `(_-</ __/ -_) __/ _   / __/ _ `/ _  / / _ \
\_,_/_/___/\_,_/___/\__/\__/_/   (_) /_/  \_,_/\_,_/_/\___/
v1.0.0-rc.2
LoRa transceiver connected
Local address of your node is 1d69bd4c
Type '/join NICKNAME' to join the chat, or '/help' for more commands.
< >

See firmware/README.md for more debugging information.

Adding Libraries

If you're including new libraries in the firmware, for PlatformIO, you wil need to add them to platformio.ini under lib_deps.

Creating Binary for Release

A full binary image can be created by reading the flash contents of a ESP32 that is flashed with the latest release of the firmware. To do this, run the following command,

esptool.py -p /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 921600 read_flash 0 0x400000 esp_flash.bin

This can then be flashed to a new device like so,

esptool.py -p /dev/ttyUSB0 --baud 460800 write_flash 0x00000 esp_flash.bin

License

  • firmware/: Dual licensed under both GPLv3 and AGPLv3
  • web/: AGPLv3