meshdesk file

Background

• MESHdesk use the LEDs of the device it is installed on to signal about the environment.
  • During startup one LED signals about the method it uses to try and fetch settings from the controller.
  • After startup, if the device is used in a mesh network it, this LED signals how many neighboring nodes it sees.
  • A second LED is used to indicate if the device has proper contact with the controller. (The LED can be either ON or OFF in such a case)
  • Finally on mesh networks we can also specify a third LED that will indicate mesh traffic flowing through a node.

Exploring our hardware

• Lets look at the Xiaomi 4A 100M as a sample.

#change directory to where the LEDs are
cd /sys/class/leds/
ls 
#These are the LEDs available
blue:power    mt76-phy0     mt76-phy1     yellow:power
#turn it off
echo "0" > yellow\:power/brightness
#turn it on
echo "1" > yellow\:power/brightness
#turn it off
echo "0" > blue\:power/brightness
#turn it on
echo "1" > blue\:power/brightness

• We can use the blue LED to signal during startup and neighbor counts.
• We can also use the yellow LED to light up if communication to the controller is broken.
• There is however not a third LED so we will not define one for the mesh traffic.

Add a hardware section for our device

• With this info we can create a hardware section in /etc/config/meshdesk

config hardware 'xiaomi_4a_100'
	option morse_led '/sys/class/leds/blue:power/brightness'
	option internet_led '/sys/class/leds/yellow:power/brightness'
	option wifi_led 'led0'

Adjust the settings section accordingly

• There are two important options here to adjust
  • hardware - have to match the value of a hardware definition under the settings section.
  • id_if - have to match the interface specified in the wan_network file.

config settings 'settings'
	option hardware 'xiaomi_4a_100'
	option id_if 'eth0'
	option lan_up_file '/tmp/lan_up'

• Later we will also use the value of xiaomi_4a_100 to define the hardware on the controller.

Alarm On or Alarm Off?

• We use the yellow LED as an alarm which means it has to light up when communication to the controller is down.
• Since we want the yellow LED to be off when the communication to the controller is fine we need to check what the current setup is.

vi /etc/MESHdesk/reporting/report_to_server.lua 
#Look for this section
    if(ok_flag)then                                 
        internetLED('0'); -- NOTE Here we can swap them around eg make it 0 to turn off a red LED when the internet is OK
        checkForContollerReboot('1');                   
    else                                                                             
        internetLED('1');                                                        
        checkForContollerReboot('0');                  
    end

Review new hardware

• The following table lists the important items with comments

Remember Your Environment

• Finally you need to adjust some items to match up with your controller and its environment.
• The following table lists some of the important items with comments

• We are nearly done. The last stop is to edit the captive_config.json file to fit our specific hardware.