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meshdesk file

Background

• MESHdesk use the LEDs of the device it is installed on to signal about the environment.
  • It signals during startup about the method it uses to try and fetch its settings at that moment.
  • If the device is used in a mesh network it will signal how many neighboring nodes it sees after startup.
  • There is also another LED 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 LED that will indicate mesh traffic flowing through a node.
  • 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

• In our case we can use the yellow LED to light up if the comms to the controller is broken.
• We can use the blue LED to signal during startup and neighbor counts.
• There is no extra LED so we will not define one for the mesh traffic.
• 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'

• This have to match the value for hardware under the settings section

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.
• The final tweak for the hardware in the config file is the interface that must be used as the id_if.
  • It will typically be eth0.
  • On devices like the MT7621 based boards it will typically be wan.
• Since we want the yellow LED to be off when the comms 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 thme around eg make it 0 to turn off a red LED when the internet is OK
        checkForContollerReboot('1');                   
    else                                                                             
        internetLED('1');                                                        
        checkForContollerReboot('0');                  
    end

• The following table lists some of the important items with comments

^ Item ^ Typical value ^ Comment ^

Tweaks For Our 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.