Interesting Uses for NYCwireless Technology

Every once in a while, we hear from people around the country that have made use of some of the technology that NYCwireless has created or has helped to develop, such as Pebble Linux or Wi-Fi Thank You.

Jim Akens, who’s a Senior Engineer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts recently contacted NYCwireless to let us know about how his research institution is using Pebble Linux to set up an off-shore wireless network to enable real-time data reconnaissance.

SWAP stands for “Ship-to-Ship/Ship-to-Shore Wireless Access Protocol”.

SWAP is a collaborative project to provide wireless networking between ships within the UNOLS research fleet and between those ships and UNOLS port facilities. SWAP has been designed to also facilitate connections with instrumented buoys.

The active administrators consist of a few volunteer engineers from varying institutions who have collaborated over several months to argue about the details and make it all work.

The goal of our labor has been to provide voluntary hardware recommendations and software configurations to meet the requirements set forth by the UNOLS Technical Enhancement Committee RVTEC. These requirements were summed up in a series of “StoryScenarios”.

To meet that goal we have provided a parts list complete with vendor information where the items can be purchased, elaborate instructions regarding construction of the devices and their installation, preconfigured operating system distributions that can be freely downloaded and detailed instructions regarding how to install the software and complete the configuration for your situation. And of course, we are happy to come and do this all for you.

To necessitate interoperability, we also provide an administrative role, doling out network addresses, hostnames and other details to participants.

This is a great use of wireless technology, and a great example of why NYCwireless develops and provides open source technology and information to help enable new uses for this technology.

You can find out more information about the Woods Hole wireless network here and here. They’ve even got some great maps of the mesh network they’ve created:

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