SPUDing Bo Kaap
SPUD, Simple Unified Dashboard for mesh networks
Published: 13 Jun 2011
We are happy to announce the public release of SPUD (SimPle Unified Dashboard). SPUD is yet another attempt to visualize a wireless mesh network running BATMAN and its users.
During the last couple of months we have written a PHP based dashboard that communicates with the BATMAN visualization server and displays real time wireless link status.
SPUD is written in CakePHP (PHP MVC framework) and uses Google Maps API 1.3 for visualization.
SPUD is design to be as simple as possible and to enable teams that install large amount of mesh nodes to visualize their networks quickly. Some of the core features of SPUD are:
Client management: Bulk import of clients from a CSV file, Edit client position with Google Maps, Tracks new clients
Link monitoring: Easy overview of active wireless links, Mesh quality in each direction of a wireless link
Customization: Colors and threshold values for link quality
SPUD code is available at: svn co http://dev.villagetelco.org/svn/villagetelco/spud/trunk/ and the default installation will monitor our demo site in Bo Kaap (Cape Town)
Freedom Fone - Village Telco Demo
Freedom Fone on Africa Gathering
Published: 12 Dec 2010
IT46 has been invited to Africa Gathering 2010 held in Nairobi, to present the Freedom Fone project. We took the opportunity to combine our most recent large development projects, Freedom Fone and the Village Telco, and demonstrate an integrated solution combining both technologies.The demonstrator consisted of three Mesh Potatoes equipped with analogue phones. One of the MP's acted as super node and was connected to the Freedom Fone server. The Mesh Potatoes offered a way to communicate with Freedom Fone free of charge. Freedom Fone 1.6.5 OR LTS was installed on a laptop with an OfficeRoute (GSM-SIP gateway) connected via Ethernet. The OfficeRoute hosted three local SIM cards which allowed us to call in to Freedom Fone via the GSM network.
During the course of the day, the Freedom Fone/Village Telco demonstrator was tried out by the participants of the event, which served as a great example of the maturity and reliability of the two products and their interoperability.
Africa Gathering is an initiative about sharing ideas for positive change. To do so, Africa Gathering provides a space to bring technophiles, thinkers, entrepreneurs, innovators and everybody else together to talk about positive change in sustainable development, technology, social networking, health, education, environment and good governance in Africa.
Village Telco - Bokaap mesh network grows
Published: 28 Oct 2010
The first mesh network in Bokaap now has over 20 nodes. The geographical situation of Bokaap (in a slope) makes the mesh very alive! In the screenshoot you can see a screenshoot of Afrimesh and the top part of the network with several nodes with redundant voice links
The Mesh in Bo-Kaap
Red Potato: An integrated Telco Platform for human beings!
Published: 22 Oct 2010
It has been two weeks of hard work in the Village Telco Camp and all the pieces of the Village Telco architecture start to fit into place. As part of the validation of the platform, fifteen wireless nodes have been installed in Bo-Kaap and we expect a total of 100 nodes in the network before the end the year.
Two major milestones of the integration are now completed:
Scalabity: The server includes support for Asterisk Realtime and our Installation wizard install a server in less than 5 minutes.
Autoprovisioning: First round of real testing of SIP auto-provisioning is giving good results. We are getting closer to a scenario where a mesh potato can be put into the network and auto-configures without intervention.
It is a very special feeling to see a system that starts to behave in the way I always dreamed about!
Village Telco Entrepenour Server (VTE)
Village Telco Server Software
Published: 22 Sep 2010
We are happy to announce the public release of our development version of the Village Telco Entrepreneur (VTE) Server. The Village Telco is an initiative to build low-cost community telephone network hardware and software that can be set up in minutes anywhere in the world. No mobile phone towers or land lines are required. The Village Telco uses the latest Open Source telephony software and low cost wireless mesh networking technology to deliver affordable telephony anywhere.
The VTE combines in one single software package a specially customized version of a2billing, a simple wizard to set-up your customers and create vouchers and a monitoring/provisioning component that interacts with the Mesh Potatoes and the Afrimesh monitoring software
Development website is now available at: http://dev.villagetelco.org
Tifinagh alphabet
54 Afrigen locales included in CLDR 1.8
Published: 17 Mar 2010
The Afrigen team is proud to announce that 54 African locales have been submitted to Unicode, and included in the CLDR 1.8 release. Out of the 54 locales, 41 was completely new to CLDR, while 13 was improvements of existing locales.This bulk submission of locales has greatly improved the footprint of African languages in CLDR, that hosted only 10+ in the previous release (most of them created by LocaleGEN, the predecessor of Afrigen). The next step for these African locales is submission to OpenOffice.org.
If you want to see a beautiful script that finally has made it to CLDR, have a look at Tachelhit, a Berber language spoken by 300,000 people in Morocco written in Tifinagh. The Tifinagh script is used by around 20 million people in Morocco for writing Berber languages including Tarifite, Tamazighe, and Tachelhite [source: www.unicode.org].
If your local language is not included in CLDR and you are willing to spend a few hours creating a locale, please contact us!
UTF8 expansion in the web!
Four years creating OpenOffice.org and Unicode locales
Published: 28 Jan 2010
What started as a small programming project it has now became the reference software to create locales for OpenOffice.org and Unicode. Our first tool (localegen) has generated 170 locales in four years. Around 25% of them has made them all the way into OpenOffice.org and Unicode's Locale Repository.
Locales come from all other the world, latest additions include: Uyghur, Maithili, Urdu, Maltese, Sardinian, Asturian and an Arabic-based locale for Oman.
During 2009, we rewrote localegen to facilitate the creation of 100 African locales. Today, Afrigen is the major effort in the world to submit African locales to Unicode!.
As you can imagine, tools need to be adapted with time and managing so many languages, scripts and features still takes considerable time of our research and development. In 2010, we are looking for a sponsor to continue our work, we plan to include more advance features in our tools (support for collation, community grading of locales, discussion forums, etc). Interested? Drop us a line!
We want to thank the IDRC for supporting us and our partner in the 100 African Locales Initiative, Kamusi Project International , as part of ANLoc. Thanks to the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden for hosting our development platform. Specially, we want to thank all contributors that have made Localegen and Afrigen a success!. We love to see (our) software used!
Two mobiles registered a openbts base station
Low cost open GSM base station for developing countries
Published: 24 Aug 2009
What did you do during your summer holidays? I was building my own GSM network!
I have been waiting almost 20 years to make this phone call!. Back in the 90's when I started my engineering studies and discovered GNU/Linux, dreamed with a system that could do what I have right now on my table :). The first attempt was in 2001 when I was completing my PhD at KTH in Sweden. During those years a group of researchers in the Laboratory started to explore the possibility of replacing as much of the GSM architecture (BSC, MSC) for open source software. Although we had a commercial GSM container with plenty of noisy equipment, the project got stuck trying to find documentation for the GSM internal interfaces.
In December 2008, I attended a conference about Mobile Service in Developing Regions. I was very surprised not to see anyone addressing the need of opening the GSM infrastructure (hardware and software). Christmas period was a good time for new projects so I decided to get in touch with the openbts project and try to build their base station. Assembling all the necessary hardware took a bit of time! David Burguess from openbts has been really helpful with hardware purchases!.
Yes! It does work, and that first phone call felt like a different one :D. The base station uses a piece of hardware known as USRP. The USRP is a radio communication system where components that have typically been implemented in hardware are now implemented using software in a PC.
We are looking for sponsors for a deployment in a developing region! Interested? Drop us a line!
Swahili Firefox Language Pack Add-on!
Swahili Language is now a Firefox add-on!
Published: 10 Jul 2009
After several months of hard work, the Swahili Language Pack for Firefox 3.5 is finally available online! The software is the result of the community effort of the Tanzanian Linux user Group (tzLUG). The software is available to download at:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12788/
If you want to install the add-on follow these steps:
- Download the latest Firefox 3.5.* from here.
- After installing the Firefox English version for your operative system, install the Swahili add-on available here .
- Finally, you need to enable the Swahili locale. Install the following add-on Locale Switcher and enable Swahili by selecting it from the Tools - Language Menu
In a hurry? If you want to find both components quickly we have prepared a add-on collection here
Presenting the Fantsuam
Local knowledge, local materials, local skills, local language, global network!
Published: 29 Apr 2009
During the UNESCO's workshop in Dhaka, we got the chance to give a presentation about some of the challenges and lessons learned in our work in Africa and Latin America. Using ICT in/for education is not only about bringing computers or Internet to the students in rural areas. Connectivity without a clear strategy and a sustainability plan is good for pilots but not to guarantee any replication.
When introducing ICT in education, there are many other aspects that needs to be taken into consideration: training methodology and curricula, access to reliable energy, localization of tools and content, added value services as voice,...
The reality of Bangladesh is overwhelming, the numbers talk: 1,000 people per square kilometer (20 in Sweden), women literacy rate 22% (99.8% in Cuba), >87.000 primary level institutions, 145 million people...
The ICT National Policy is a good piece of work that includes the promotion and use of cost-effective, open source and open architecture solutions and the promotion of Bangla language.
