Category: Featured

Writing a Requirement Specification Document for a Software Project

May 1st, 2019
When a problem or solution requiring software is conceived it is essential that the software project is properly conveyed to the software house, agency or project staff creating the software. When constructing the document there are defined standards that the SRS may be structured to follow, such as IEEE Std 830-1998 which has been superseded by IEEE Std 29148-2011.

The document may also be written by the customer should the client choose to do so as it may provide more control of the specifications required in the project. Simply a Software Requirements Specification (SRS) could be titled ;

This is what the customer wants the software to do.

Introduction

The introduction should indicate the expected behaviors of the software as clearly as possible detailing the processes, activities, interfaces, and tasks required by the software. The introduction can be muddied if the software is not already clearly conceptualized or thought out or is to be built onto existing software if the requirements are not understood by all parties. It may also be necessary to indicate the expected life cycle, phase-out period and maintenance required to maintain the performance and usability of the software. Users may also be considered.

Purpose

An SRS document may state the purpose of the software which could be considered an ultimate end-goal of the resulting project and consider the project a failure if not met. It should conclude with affirming that this document specifies how the software should be designed, developed, tested and implemented where applicable. If the purpose is to improve the speed of current business processes then make it appear in the purpose section, if the purpose is to improve the usability of the current software used by staff then include it in the purpose section as well. If the software is also supposed to do something not included in the purpose or easily justified by this section, then it can be hard to justify why such a feature should exist in the project.

Scope

The scope of the document is to provide a description of what the document specification includes, such as use cases and requirements. Some of the program may be in multiple documents so the scope is necessary to reduce overlap between projects.

System Overview

System Overview provides a description of the context, function and requirements of the software project.

References

References should indicate if the software is somewhat pre-existing, any references made in the document and references to appendixes should also be included too.

Overall Description

The overall description is the second section of the SRS document.

Product Perspective

A product perspective is a detailed outlook of what the program should appear like to the users of the system, some software projects may be completely transparent to users, if so then the product perspective should outline the interfacing between other software components that make it so.
- The overall description should not be vague, it should provide justification as to why the functions of the program are required.
- The overall description should detail crucial cornerstones of the program and interfaces that exist with the hardware or software.
- Some of the programs may be pre-existing which will require the project interface detailed and easily readable to be understood.
The Description should have six sections,
- System Interfaces which the user may interact with the system or the system may interact with other systems.
- User Interfaces which the users may interact with which may include the frequency of their usage and the intuitiveness of the design.
- Hardware. Including the frequency of use of the hardware, considerations to the longevity of the hardware and ability to update or dispose of the hardware.
- Software. Including external interfaces, naming conventions.
- Communication and Telecom both in interfaces software to software and to the user.
- Memory. Including minimum requirements.
- Operations and processes that the program may perform real-time or batch, transaction or otherwise.
- Adaptations and the ability to configure the system. For open source or high-security systems, this section may be larger than private or closed source software due to the need to ensure that it is secure or can be maintained or made depreciated quickly.
Design Constraints
- What are the limitations of the software?
- What might the software fail to perform at?
- What are the limitations of the programming language if selected?
- How might this delay the project if risks arise?
- What are the limitations of the users’ ability?
- What training will need to take place in order to use the software effectively?
- What does the software not do?
- What happens if a user does not use the software as intended?
In most aspects of software engineering, there are simply parts of human nature and failure modes or edge cases that simply cannot always be mitigated, in such scenarios it is important to outline what steps your software has taken to make these issues not slow the productivity of the software and ensure that the system runs as intended part of this may be detailed in test cases written in the appropriate section.

Product Functions

Product Functions should as best as possible describe the function of the program and how the modules of the program if any will work together with the interfaces of the system to produce the software’s desired functions.

The aim of the section is to break down the large characteristics of the program into more readable and manageable sections that can be delegated out to a team or read to an individual clearly without much overlap to avoid confusing what the program is designed to accomplish and what each function does.
- The functions should be organized and listed so that they may be read for the first time and understood effectively.
- The section may include graphical sections or UML detailing how the program may operate.
- The validity of the input.
- Sequence diagrams or how the program may pass data between functions.
- How the program accounts for abnormality.
- Common input examples may be a good way of explaining the function to the reader and providing a sample of what the programmer should accomplish on each function.
- Sequencing.
User Characteristics

When a user may use the system either from time to time (i.e. infrequently), once or many many times it is important to detail this information in the user characteristics section and account for this in the software, if the methods used to do something are contrived or confusing it could lead to increased mistakes or data mismanagement further down the line and increase the need for normalization or reconciliation of information.
- User Characteristics should detail the factors that affect each user and provide use cases for each user, it may also be ideal to detail overlapping functions that each user may use and diagram where appropriate.
- It also may be applicable to detail why each user may need a function of the program.
Specific Requirements

The specific requirements should detail all of the requirements of the clients, the user and the software itself. It should provide suitable detail to enable the software to be written clearly and tested effectively. It should be stated for each requirement which user the requirement is for and if applicable that the test case corresponding to the requirement should be satisfied through cross-referencing other parts of the document.
- The requirements should be clearly stated to prevent later mistakes or edge cases, poorly written requirements or poorly designed functions may cause the program to be unstable or possibly unsuitable for use. Proper error handling should be given to most aspects of the programs requirement and how it operates to meet the requirement.
- Vagueness or Failings in test cases may allow for requirements to be deliberately misinterpreted, such as “The program must be fast and easy to use” may be considered easy to use for the programmer or tester, and therefore a suitable statement that the requirement is met, but not for the user who may not understand the inner workings of the software and therefore lack the knowledge to use the software effectively as much as the programmer testing the requirement, it may be a good idea to allow the users to try the functions using agile development and adapting the program accordingly.
The final part of the document should include the appendices and the index.
Fixing an Accenta/Optima Alarm Power Failure Troubleshooting

April 1st, 2019
A long time ago our alarm box died and I thought it was time we diagnose an fix the issue.

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO COPY IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. CONTACT AN ELECTRICIAN OR ALARM INSTALLER.
We will be opening a delicate box with potentially live mains power and could cause damage to yourself or the panel.

Accenta Home Alarm Control Box (left)

As you can see, although our isolation switch is set to ‘ON’ the power light on the alarm box is not illuminated. This may be because,
- The battery in the alarm has died.
- A fuse in the alarm box has blown.
- There is a fault with the incoming power to the alarm box.
- There is a fault with the main board of the alarm box.
We know that there is no fault with the existing setup because the alarm used to work, so we can start to diagnose our four potential issues. I’ll also teach you how to reset your panel.

Opening the Panel

This step is the easiest but can be daunting for some. Remember, safety first. We will be dealing with a panel that may be receiving mains voltage.

Accenta / Optima alarm panel tamper switch

When we open the box, there is a small spring that pushes against the door, this little spring ensures that any burglars who attempt to open the panel, trigger the alarm. As our alarm is not working, nothing will happen but if the alarm does sound, then it may be a sign that your panel does not have a power issue, consider resetting your alarm. Unscrew the two front facing screws. Note that from here on out, experienced competent people should continue.

Accenta / Optima alarm control box with bottom section removed

Now that we have taken the bottom section off completely, we need access to the top of the main board as well. There is a fuse we need to test in the top half of the alarm panel so we’re going to remove the top half as well, this bit is just as easy as the bottom half, but there is a speaker attached to the housing, we can remove the speaker by unscrewing the terminals or do what I did and simply let the top half dangle by its wires (lazy but effective).

Accenta / Optima alarm control box completely opened

Testing the External Power Supply to the Box
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(If you are following along and have an Optima remote alarm panel, you may  need to find a box similar to mine, but it does not have any controls or lights - its also likely that your remote panel is not illuminated and the screen is off if it is a power issue.)
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Power Light Not Illuminated

Firstly we need to test that the incoming power supply is working, this is where our AC Voltage tester comes in (fear not if you don’t have one but do have a voltmeter).

VoltAlert Wand

Using this wand we can see if there is power coming into the alarm. (If you don’t have one of these and are following along at home, you can set your voltmeter to AC or ṽ and place your black lead into the COM jack and red lead into the VOmA jack and when we open the alarm panel later put your test leads on the incoming supply chock block above the transformer, using the left brown and blue wire screws)

Place the wand near the incoming mains wire, if the wand sounds and flashes, congratulations. We have determined that the alarm panel is receiving power to its transformer.

If there is no power, consider using a voltmeter as explained above to verify. If there is still definitely no power then a fuse may have blown in the isolation switch or the ring main RCD may have tripped, so consider diagnosing if they are the issue.

Testing the Alarm Battery

If you think that the Accenta / Optima alarm has stopped working due to a battery failure, we can test the battery by connecting test leads to the battery terminals on either side of the battery block or on the battery directly, you will need to turn off power to the alarm so that we don’t get the feed in voltage from the board. Do not put your voltmeter test leads in the red highlighted section. Make sure to set your voltmeter back to measuring DC voltage if you set it for AC earlier. Place your test leads on both screws on the green highlighted area.

Alarm Panel Power Block

If you don’t get a reading or a low reading (3V or less) then your alarm battery may have ran out because of power failure. If your battery reads ~12V then it is a good indicator that your alarm panel is faulty and will need to be replaced entirely, but I would suggest you check the fuses before doing so to verify.

Testing Fuses in the Accenta / Optima Alarm Box

If you have verified that the incoming power is working and your alarm battery is depleted then a fuse is a most likely cause of the alarm failing.

To test the fuses, you need to set your voltmeter to continuity mode and then test each side of the fuses contacts. Make sure the power is switched off before and during testing any fuses. If any are blown, replace like for like.

Accenta / Optima alarm panel fuse locations

The fuses are as follows, from left to right; –
- RKP or Remote Keypad
- Internal Speaker
- Bell / Strobe
- Battery
- Transformer
Resetting the Accenta / Optima Alarm Panel

To reset the alarm panel, remove power to the panel and short the SET output to the left PA input terminal. Then turn on the alarm and allow it to power up completely. After a few seconds, you can then switch off the alarm once again and remove the shorting wires. Make sure to replace any wires previously installed and then power up the unit again, the default 0123 code will now have been restored. Beware in doing this, you reset any zones, such as fire zones will have been reset.
Tracking My Position all the Time

March 1st, 2019
I have a long standing interest in monitoring my daily doings, I previously thought about putting a GPS tracker in my car, a good idea for both tracking my position and also checking to see if it has gone walkies (is stolen). I decided against doing this a while ago due to exams and lack of time to set the whole thing up. But I did decide to have a crack at this idea later with my phone.

The way I chose to go about this power hungry task was to use an app like IFTTT to record my position to a spreadsheet. But then I heard about owntracks, a purpose-built app for tracking your position. After setting up the owntracks server, MQTT and owntracks recorder. I now have a pretty good way of determining where I am at one time or another and have been using it for about 6 months.

My phone is a OnePlus 3 and as I said the app is fairly power hungry. Currently owntracks uses ~39% of my battery’s capacity based on 1 day 1 hour uptime. Although this seems fairly high I have accepted it as a fair compromise untill I can finish another GPS project I have in the works.

Here’s my experience of such a setup so far,
- Battery usage increased significantly to a point where some users may not find it acceptable.
- I had to turn off battery optimization and advanced battery optimization or else the app would stop.
- The app does not always capture my location all of the time, sometimes it may be a few hours before it reports a significant change despite being in move monitoring mode or significant changes mode.
- The performance and recording of positions in the app isn’t as good if the app does not have internet access all the time, so if data is switched off in my phone, the recording of the position isn’t as good as if it were on all the time, sometimes there can be large gaps where there was no internet access where it drops out.
- My use case was for later analysis of the data, not realtime.
- Owntracks recorder is not very featured but it does the job.

Exporting GnuCash Data to PowerBi

February 1st, 2019

Some things are better if you do them yourself. I mainly did this project to keep a running ledger of the changes that I would need to keep track of the account balance data.

GnuCash is great, but when I export my accounts data the CSV file isn’t easily translated with power-query automatically. I decided that because I need to keep track of my transactions, this problem was best suited with a little program to calculate my net inflows and outflows using a python program, I also decided halfway through the project that I wanted to hook it up to my graphing backend, a silly idea – but a fun one to see my spends go up and down. I decided that I’d publish it here so that in the future I would find it a lot easier.

Traditionally if you wanted to export GnuCash data from CSV to PowerBi, you’d be better off using their inbuilt power query, however, I wanted to implement a ledger system, something that I don’t think can be accomplished directly in PowerBi without some scripting, and in the future I want to be able to change platforms if I need to because I no longer have a licence for PowerBi or want to use something else like excel or free equivalents like Google Sheets. I reckon that if done properly Google Scripts could make everything run automagically from an upload, but I don’t have my reports ready yet for that to happen.

# Extracted from here https://github.com/aidancrane/GnuCash-CSV2CSV-for-PowerBi/blob/master/convert_to_powerBI.py

import csv
from re import sub
from decimal import Decimal
import time


# If we only want the transactions values, set this to true and they will print to console, they do not save to accounts_out.csv!
numbersOnly = False

# Anyone thats not me will want this to be false, this is used to show the transaction data on a live graph I use for scratching around with.
smoothieChartEmulation = False
sessionCookie = "39494goodluckguessingthispartlololol213232expiresanyway"

# Leave this here so that Notepad++ and Atom auto-suggest it.
# Date,Account Name,Number,Description,Notes,Memo,Category,Type,Action,Reconcile,To With Sym,From With Sym,To Num.,From Num.,To Rate/Price,From Rate/Price

if (smoothieChartEmulation):
     import requests

# Negative Numbers are bracketed when exported from GNUCash so we need to fix that for the float data type.
def convert_if_negative(number):
    returnNumber = str(number)
    if ("," in returnNumber):
        if ("(" in returnNumber):
            returnNumber = returnNumber[1:]
            returnNumber = returnNumber[:-1]
            returnNumber = returnNumber.replace(",", "")
            returnNumber = 0 - round(float(returnNumber), 2)
        returnNumber = str(returnNumber).replace(",", "")
    if ("(" in returnNumber):
        returnNumber = Decimal(sub(r'[^\d.]', '', returnNumber))
        return (0 - round(float(returnNumber), 2))
    return returnNumber

# open accounts.cvs, our exported file.
with open("accounts.csv", "r") as csvIn:
    reader = csv.DictReader(csvIn)
    entries = []

    runningTotal = float(0)
    
	# Save
    for row in reader:
        if (row["Account Name"] == ""):
            pass
        else:
            runningTotal = runningTotal + float(convert_if_negative(row["To Num."]))
            if (numbersOnly):
                print(str(round(runningTotal, 2)))
            else:
                if (smoothieChartEmulation):
                    payload = {'random_graph': runningTotal}
                    r = requests.get('https://dash.infinityflame.co.uk/dash/flex.php', params=payload, cookies={'PHPSESSID': sessionCookie})
                print(str(convert_if_negative(row["To Num."])) + " Description: "+ row["Description"] + " Account Balance: " + str(round(runningTotal, 2)))
                entries.append([row["Date"],row["Description"],row["Category"],str(convert_if_negative(row["To Num."])),str(round(runningTotal, 2))])

# Save what we care about to our new csv for power BI   
with open('accounts_out.csv', mode='w', newline='') as csvOut:
    titles = ["Date","Description","Destination","Transaction","Account Balance"]
    writer = csv.writer(csvOut, delimiter=',', quotechar='"', quoting=csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL)
    writer.writerow(titles)
    for transaction in entries:
        writer.writerow(transaction)

I used python because it’s quick to debug in Atom and I know it well. The way this snippet is used is to export an account from GnuCash, then use this program to output the final CSV to be taken in by PowerBi, I’ve chained these steps together. The final result is stored in accounts_out.csv.

Thanks!

Opening up my Tile Mate

January 1st, 2019

Bluetooth trackers are a great addition to anyone’s cluttered key chain, Last year I got a Tile Mate as a present. A nifty little key-chain Bluetooth connected sounder for when I loose my keys, or when I loose my phone.

So far given one years use I have maybe used it seriously to find my phone 2 or 3 times, it works very well for it. Anyway now that I’ve had a years use, the Tile app decided they wanted more money as the battery was getting low. Interestingly enough in the newest versions of the Tile Mate the battery is replaceable, however in this version (replaceable or not) the method to open the case is rather destructive.

The Tile Mate Main board, front and back case housing.

Forgive the image, it was rather late at night, As you can see there was a replaceable CR2025, so changing the battery was as simple as replacing it with a battery I had spare. I wonder what ’62’ means?

I couldn’t get the data-matrix to scan on my phone app unfortunately, but the board is very pretty and its clear a lot of thought has gone into keeping the size small. I like the little Pogo pins on the right for the piezo on the lid and the little pcb antenna. Also featured, the timing crystal oscillator, microprocessor and what looks like a version number for the board.

Anyway, then I put it all back together nice and snug inside its now fairly tarnished case and used some 5-second-fix glue to glue it back together and jobs-a-gooden, almost. It seems like the message on the app still persists.

Anyways, I’m still happy with it, it’s served its time and I think I’ve broken it a little too much to replace it again. In the future perhaps with the latest version, tile could offer some sort of slot so that the battery can be replaced a little less destructively (or maybe I did it wrong, oops). Nevertheless I don’t advise doing it yourself. TTFN, Aidan.

Cya later, Mate.
Business Processes Re-engineering

December 1st, 2018
When a business grows and adapts it often requires a lot of overhauls, both physically and digitally. Processes that previously worked or were effective for purpose are no longer so. Because of this a business will re-engineer part of its business processes to adapt.

Reasons Why a Business May Adapt its Processes

A business may change the way it functions for many reasons,
- The business is expanding and it’s old process needs to handle the additional capacity or machinery.
- The function the old system used to serve has been superseded or removed from the business process as it is no longer required.
- The business is being merged or acquired by another and duplicate processes need to be removed or increased and vice versa.
- The process currently being used is not dynamic enough to be useful anymore or is causing issues.
- A process is failing or is not always effective.
- The current process has too many avoidable errors.
Reasons Why a Process May Need Changing

A business may change it’s processes for many reasons, such as ; –
- Improve the speed of operation.
- Improve the customization or dynamic of a process.
- Improve the continuity or compatibility to connect the process to other processes.
- As a reaction to changing legislation, laws or consumer complaints.
- Improve the efficiency of a process.
- Improve the operating cost of a process.
- Improve the output or capacity of a process.
- Improve the working capital investment in a process.
- Improve quality of a product.
- Change the product.
Re-engineering a process not only requires identifying a change but enacting that change can take a lot of steps to complete, especially for products in areas that are heavily reliant on compliance and conformity, such as electrical appliances or medial tools.

Improving Efficiency Caveats

Changing a business process can be risky and should have appropriate risk analysis in place where processes are crucial to the business process or jobs.

Many businesses re-engineer their processes simply to ensure that their product or products match demand. Overhauling business processes may not be financially viable if the number of defects or failing products outweighs the cost of replacing the machinery or software process.

Improving the speed of a process may make the process faster but the business may also want to change the system implemented, such as using a batch process system where the job can be completed as part of a ‘batch’. Having many batches however can lead to greater working capital on complex components or products and can mean that if there is a problem with one then it is likely that the whole batch is also going to fail. Batch processing can also make quality control and quality assurance much harder and more expensive to enact.
Information Systems in Business

November 1st, 2018
Many large businesses such as manufacturers or suppliers, factories or distribution centres have many Information Systems set up and designed to handle the large quantities of processes involved in conducting their function.

Large Information Systems

Some businesses are so large that their processes may require information systems to handle day-to-day business processes. One such example is order processing. Businesses with large order systems or large quantities of products to manufacture may only handle order processing through information systems.

One such information system used in a logistical setting is one that would be used to record inbound goods. Physical product businesses for example need to record incoming raw materials or ordered products to process them and turn them into a product. Without a centralised information system it can be very hard to keep track of stock levels, although maintaining the whereabouts of goods used by the business can be useful but in the real world some of these goods can go missing, be wasted, damaged or arrive having already being damaged. This is why information systems must be able to handle losses and inform stock keepers when the product is becoming depleted and must be re-ordered especially on systems that involve Kanban or Just in Time systems. This is one such example of where information systems must be able to handle all scenarios that an employee will encounter.

Examples of Business Information Systems

Business information systems have different requirements throughout the various departments;

Human Resources must be able to use information systems to
handle processes such as,
- Employee Payroll.
- Employee Performance.
- Hiring and Job Roles.
- Staff Records and Employee Contracts.
- Holiday Management and Illness.
- Training Programs.
- Attendance and Absenteeism.
- Staff Disciplinary Records.
Senior Management may not always use information systems as their roles may be too strategic or sporadic to construct an information system, however they may have daily or even business cyclic tasks such as,
- Monitoring performance of the business or business processes.
- Maintaining customer relationships through relationship management software or CRM.
- Assess generalised performance of a store or business through warehouse management software or employee performance.
- Make strategic decisions about business processes by using sales data or reporting software.
- Identify problems with processes or business cycles.
- Generate Reports for Sales, Product Development or Manufacturers.
General Management may use information systems to,
- Distribute work to employees.
- Identify problems with processes or business cycles.
- Monitor Employee clock-in times.
- Monitor Employee processes or performance.
- Record Paying Hours or Overtime.
- Action directions from higher up.
- Discipline employees.
- Correct or Normalise Data on the System.
- Query or edit the database.
- Prioritise.
Employees may use information systems to,
- Action Jobs tasked to them.
- Query a database.
- Create orders for customers.
Some of the advantages of using an information system
- It may aide the speed a process in a business can be completed as all of the data needed is centralised and managed in one place.
- The information system may enable employees to manage large orders or information as a batch.
- The information system may be able to prioritise important jobs on the system.
- Mistakes could be identified by the system and prompt the user to rectify it.
- The system may improve or identify bottlenecks in the business process.
- The system may allow for customers to interact with it directly and therefore reduce the time it takes for a business to fulfill a customers desires.
- The system may be compatible with other systems through an API which can link systems together.
Some of the disadvantages of using an information system
- If the system is custom or highly specialised making changes to it can be hard or expensive or slow.
- The information system may be slow which could frustrate users.
- The system may not have all the features an employee desires or,
- The system may not allow some of their users to change data that they need to change.
- The information system may not be suited for its use case.
- Employees may have preferred the previous method or may not be it savvy enough to use the system.
- The system may be designed in such a way that mistakes become a problem.
- The system may be abused by employees for gain. (clocking out early, marking work as completed when it isn’t)
- If it breaks a business may not be able to function if they are reliant on it.
- If it breaks it may corrupt data that may be unrecoverable.
Custom Information Systems

And there are many more examples of businesses using information systems. Many of them my abe trivial or bespoke, however there are programs designed to make information systems at a higher level than writing a program for them, One such example is Microsoft Access.

Many businesses will use Microsoft Access or custom programs to create their data and manage company process. Added advantages of using a custom program is that the company may use a single program (or a single database) for a large business process are,
- Having a custom program allows the business to construct the data they wish to use when they need to, such as recording information that other companies may not.
- Using a custom program may allow for the business to create specific access control levels.
- Customisation like company logos or specific company colors or themes.
- Many Many more…
Gigabit and More on my Home Network

October 1st, 2018

In a recent pursuit to have the fastest speeds possible at home, I have started to upgrade and replace a large section of my home network.

Ensuring That My Network Runs Fast at its Core

Barring the routing technologies at home the most crucial part of my network is my server, an old Dell Optiplex 780 salvaged from an office clear-out it now spends its days hosting my media, files and applications. One of the first things I did was replace all of the cabling around my network. Most being CAT5 the fastest speeds possible were only 100Mbps, this was a noticeable bottleneck when I checked iPerf3 as the switch its connected to, the router and my PC were all gigabit connected and clearly an oversight on my part. Replacing the cable from it to the switch instantly jumped the speed to gigabit. Yay!

Getting Rid of Old Hardware

Another decision I made was to remove some of my old hardware that was no longer up to the task of Gigabit+ speed. That for me meant swapping out a dumb switch capable of 100Mbps max for a new 8 port gigabit one, oddly I bought the 100Mbps one for £10 and sold it for £14 on Ebay so I guess theres money in old switches.

I then replaced its cables too and viola, 1 Gbps throughput on the whole wired network!

What does the future hold?

After looking at transfer speeds between my server and PC, I think the next step is to replace the Optiplex and my PC, as they are now at the point where their age is starting to be a performance problem, although they remain somewhat performant at their daily duties they are both starting to age poorly with the increasing demand from myself for hosting my projects.

I also want to try SFTP+ but I don’t yet have the SSDs or Hard-drives to necessitate it.
My Meraki Home Network

September 10th, 2018

Cisco Meraki MR18

If you have ever wanted to use WiFi reliably in your own home, most homelabbers and computer enthusiasts will eventually learn that using consumer equipment to achieve fast speeds and low ping can be a route that many take in vain, whilst mesh networking appliances look promising for home applications, the ever vast expanding market of power-line networking adapters and WiFi range extenders have lead consumers astray and often leave them unhappy with their network performance due to patchy and inconsistent behavior caused by devices looking for the ‘strongest’ signal despite it not necessarily being the fastest or most optimal.

Having an ISP issued router has never put me off fiddling before, having being issued a Netgear WNR3500L V2 it wasn’t long before I decided to flash Tomato on it and leave Netgear Genie hopefully forever.

Having moved on with my life I quickly became unhappy with the performance of the WiFi and decided it needed sprucing up a little bit, running two routers on two sides of the house were becoming tiresome due to patchiness and being connected to one side of the house while at the other requiring manual adjustment. It was time to buy something enterprise to set-and-forget. Alas enterprise comes with a hefty price tag.

Rather than going mainstream and buying something like Ubiquiti or MikroTiK, popular routers with the home lab community. I decided to take a different approach to save a buck. Having flashed firmware on many devices in the past, such as Arduino, ESP8266s or even other routers I decided to get my hands on the enterprise CISCO Meraki MR18, a subscription model router with a hefty price tag at the current time of £308.38 for a three-year license. Would I be paying that? Absolutely not.

I picked one up off eBay for a fairly high market price of £17.99 which came with a wall bracket and no plug or license. Why so cheap compared to the £308.38 price tag? Well, it turns out Meraki are giving them away free to anyone who sits through their webinar, and once the license runs out it’s my understanding that they essentially become paperweights. Once it arrived I fired it up just to see what it used to be called and see if I could get a hit on WiGLE’s database to see where this thing came from, unfortunately, 0 hits means my best guess is that it came from somewhere around Aylesbury, UK. The location of the Ebay E-Recycler the SSID was generic “Guest Access” and “Staff Internet”.

Once I cleaned up the router it looked brand new, the power cable I got from my drawer of many cables and began to study the thing, the brushed aluminum backing had the screws hidden behind rubber feet, an easy adversary I had the thing open in no time.

Big RF Shields 🙂

I particularly like the bendy lightpipe for the RGB leds.

The UART pins were neatly placed and populated with pins at the top of the AP and easy to flash with.

I decided to opt for flashing OpenWRT on to it, basically because at the time they were the only ones supporting this particular device and it would only really be acting as an Access Point, with my Tomato router doing all the hard work.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy this picture of my neighbors cat.
Transitioning from Google Map Editor to OpenStreetMap

June 9th, 2018
After using Google Maps for quite a while, I enjoyed areas that had buildings populated on the map, Google does a very good job of this, however since Google Map Maker closed, I felt somewhat disenfranchised with their mapping system, It became a lot harder to edit their maps and the experience is just not as good as Map Maker was.

A Google Maps screen capture of my neighborhood.

Then one day I discovered OpenStreetMaps and the simplicity of their map editor filled the hole in my heart that Map Maker left. I found that Open Street Maps iD editor was both friendly to use and better than Map Maker, the iD editor had a much more intuitive interface and the wiki made the transition generally easy and enjoyable.

An Open Street Maps screen capture of my neighborhood.

As with any change, there was a little bit of a learning curve but the wiki was informative and allowed me to transition from my amateur interest in the topic of cartography into a full-blown contributor to the eco-system. I also have started using the JOSM editor a little and have found that its tools have made contributing much easier for bulk operations and mainly use the iD editor for tidy-up or casual map corrections or contributions.

Why Open Street Map?

Contributing to a closed system like Google maps was never really a problem for me using my local knowledge to correct open times and add photos to locations, but once I discovered Open Street Maps, I sort of feel like there’s no going back. There are a lot of reasons I like Open Street Map,
- Its Open, the maps can be used in any application, the license only requires that OSM is credited when your application is public. (Copyleft Attribution-Share-Alike)
- Its used in a lot of applications that I use already, updating the map on OSM will improve those applications too. 🙂
- Editing polygons seem to be a lot easier than Google Map Editor.
- Using an Open system would be preferable over something that in the future could potentially become a closed source or paid for.
I intend to update my local area, as Open Street Maps relies on community contributions it is apparent that it has not been updated in a while. Watch this space.