Bridging CellSol Networks with IRC!

in: community, cellsol, science

CellSol has just pushed a cool new feature to its development branch on GitHub: the ability to bridge networks over the wider Internet, using Internet Relay Chat (IRC).

Beta 0.30, which will release in the next few days, will contain the ability to relay messages across an IRC server, whose address and channel are set in the config.h file. This allows CellSol networks, normally localized and restricted to LoRa, to communicate with each other over the wider Internet. Previously, CellSol could only communicate with end users over the Internet, using a web-based chat terminal (in the photo). Now an IRC client can be used instead.

Messages coming through IRC are prefixed with a hex ID for the originating node’s IRC connection (much like any user gets a hex ID) followed by > and a hex ID for the receiving node’s IRC connection (again, like any other user). If the message originated from the IRC channel, it will be prefixed with the node ID, and the IRC user’s name. Messages received by the pylon from other channels (LoRa, web, bluetooth, serial) will be forwarded to the IRC server as the CellSol node’s IRC user. ![photos/communitymemory.png]

If a message is received in the IRC channel, quickly parse it: if it starts with the configured prefix (default ~~) or if it comes from another cellsol pylon as determined by nickname, forward it to the other channels (serial, bluetooth, web, LoRa). if it’s from another pylon, extract the hextag and use that instead of the nickname, for brevity. If it does not have the prefix or a pylon identifier, ignore it. (this lets people on irc that have high bandwidth talk before deciding what to xmit to radio, and avoids spam).

We are very happy to be supporting the CellSol project, and will continue to construct additional pylons.

Keep an eye out on https://www.f3.to/cellsol for updates on the beta. We will be continuing to support them on this blog, as well. You can buy CellSol kits in our store.