Commotion Pi: Preliminary Investiagion

My obsession for living an "off-grid" lifestyle has brought my thoughts to my reliance on the internet. Knowledge being the key to a convergent vision, a web without infrastructure is pertinent. Why pay for a service we can create ourselves? Buy the physical hardware and the rest is free, as in beer.

Off grid power is fairly simple, especially with the constantly improving solar and battery technologies. Almost everyone owns a wireless communication devices, yet we rely on an outside service to provide the communication platform. A service that is costly, unreliable and restricted. Could we make our own internet?

Have you ever noticed the Ad-Hoc setting when configuring a wireless device? In this case we will use definition #2:

"fashioned from whatever is immediately available"

 

There are definitely a number of wireless devices "immediately available" on my desk here alone.   

 

Enter Commotion Wireless ( http://www.commotionwireless.net )...

 

I have been searching to see if anyone has used a raspberry pi to create a Commotion node. All I have found is this blog post so far:

 

https://jumoke021.wordpress.com/category/commotion-on-raspberry-pi/

 

NOT a whole lot of information, BUT enough to get me started. I already have a RPi Rev. A with raspbian on it. I am going with the Rev. A as I shouldn't need an enormous amount rescources to accomplish my task (single usb port for wifi card) and the RPi A uses less power making it more suited to something solar/battery powered. First step is upgrade to Raspbian Jesse per this post:

 

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=47944

 

I will blog as I go, and if all works out will finish with a how-to.