Your network · it arrived

The seven steps

The parcel arrived. These seven steps go in order and get done over several sittings, so the checkboxes remember where you left off — they live in your browser and go nowhere else.

Tick off what you have done and it stays saved in your browser. There is a purchase in the middle, so this does not happen in one afternoon.

1. Buy two, not oneThis is not a device, it is a pair. A lone node has nobody to talk to unless your city already has a mesh, and it does little switched on for a while.It is the most expensive and most common mistake: you buy one to try it, nothing happens, and it goes in a drawer.
2. When it arrives, check the band BEFORE switching it onThe frequency is printed on the board. Check it against the one you need while you can still return it.This step exists because the listing is not enough, and the count of how many do not state it is up above. Switching it on is keeping it.
3. Flash it from your browserYou plug it into a computer over USB and install the firmware from a web page, with nothing to download or compile. It takes a couple of minutes.
4. Set the regionIt is the setting that decides which frequency it talks on. Without it, the device does not transmit.
5. Pair your phone over BluetoothThe phone app is what writes and reads the messages. It can stay in airplane mode, as the top of this page says.
6. Create the private channel and share it as a QR codeThe channel carries its own key. The app shows it as a QR code and the other person scans it: with that both nodes are in the same conversation and nobody else reads it.Until you do this you are on the public channel, which is everyone's. It works, but it is not private.
7. Go out and measure your real rangeWalk apart until it drops, and note where. That is your number, and it is the only one that counts: the graphic above gives you the ceiling, this gives you what is actually in your street.Do it twice: once at street level and once with one of the two up on a roof. The gap between those two numbers is, in your own city, the whole lesson of this page.