Hello! This week the my project for Google Summer of Code 2024 ends, and this blog post is a final report of everything that I have done toward its goal. (Report 1) (Report 2)
During this project, I had the opportunity to attend and organize multiple events to present LibreMesh to a new public.
In August, I was invited in an open-source radio program called “radio source”, on Radio Source. During this, I had one hour to talk about and explain LibreMesh to a huge public. Being on the wave was an incredible experience where I could explain the usefulness of mesh networking, and how LibreMesh and Pirania solve many issues encountered by a community interested in setting up this kind of network. The recording of this session (in French) is available here: https://libremesh.org/news.html#2023_09_06_libremesh_on_the_waves.
The following Saturday and Sunday, I held a workshop at the Caldarium in Brussels (https://caldarium.be/en:start), where people brought their unused routers, flashed them and we built a mesh network together. Multiple people came because they heard about it from the radio event. We spent two days flashing various routers and setting them up around as far as they could in the Caldarium’s huge space, to setup a community mesh network, which is still up and being worked on.
I also organized, recorded and uploaded a QnA session which many senior members of LibreMesh attended, on how to start development on LibreMesh. This video is useful to developers as a supplement to the “development” page on the LibreMesh website.
Having the opportunity to understand the project in a deeper way, and organizing these were to me the highlight of this GSoC project. The recording of this session is available on Guifi-net/eXO’s Peertube https://media.exo.cat/w/4o9xgZ65so6d5i1vmVd35z.
The mailing list was the location of many discussions toward the project, and the multiple solutions that could be implemented (some of then also have been mentioned in the mid-point report (https://blog.freifunk.net/2024/07/12/gsoc-2024-libremesh-cable-purpose-autodetection-update/). You can find some examples of such discussions in the mailing list, for example here and here.
To finish this blog post, I will address the elephant in the room. I do not have a link to code in this blog post. During the many hours I spent understanding more and more the codebase, I didn’t manage to write functional code, only snippets that weren’t able to be integrated in the main LibreMesh code. Many of these hurdles were documented in the half-point update I made in July, and I didn’t manage to get over most of them. As a result, I don’t have code to show off as a result of this project.
My presence during this project started many more discussions on the topic in the mailing list and meetings, and I hope that this subject has been broadened and explored again for a re-try at these implementation from someone else!
I would like to thank everyone in the LibreMesh project for your time and your patient explanations, and especially Ilario for mentoring me during it, and for your sage advice. I would also like to thank Andi Bräu for managing the Freifunk role in this project, and allowing this project to happen.