Althea Development Update #56: Network Organization support
Update Summary
Several new networks getting started (about 5) some made videos of their setups one, two.
With network features now generally stable a lot of people are getting online and using Althea. Likewise development has shifted gears from putting out fires to cranking out actual blockchain/payment features.
In parallel we are working on documentation and additional polish to provide easier access for people who want to try Althea now that it is approaching stability.
What’s New in Alpha 9
- Local network enforcement with early DAO contract
- Checks to wifi password and name to prevent accidental breakage
- Added api to view neighbours debts
- Update lots of dependencies
- Cleanup of old tunnels
- Dashboard interface refresh
- Rasbperry PI targets!
Network DAO
That’s right folks, after months of tinkering with networking to get things just right we finally have our first on-blockchain features in test.
As part of our governance model we’re creating Aragon powered local network organizations.
Local communities can create an Aragon organization governed however they like. Althea devices then integrate with this organization to collect funds and manage the network.
How this will normally work is that a community can organize and insitute a governance structure and a membership fee, they can then in a decentralized way manage those proceeds to be used for improving the network or providing services to members.
What we have right now is a pretty barebones selection screen and code on the routers that will query neighbors for membership on the local Network DAO once you turn it on.
We’re hoping to have payments and proper voting in the next few weeks.
Raspberry PI targets
As our most requested feature we now have Raspberry PI OpenWRT targets available on the releases and firmware pages. For lack of extra ports the Ethernet jack is a meshing port and the wifi is used for LAN connections.
It’s not really useful for real world scenarios, there aren’t enough ports to resell connectivity easily and still be able to use it as a home device. But generally everyone has one lying around to play with so it’s an easy way to try things out.
Documentation
We’re hard at work on a refreshed website and updated documentation. Our landing page has become painfully out of date and now that the software is ready for people to seriously use it the difficulty of navigating and understanding what we’re trying to do with our current messaging is making itself more and more known.
I’m really happy with the designs we have so far and I think you will be too.
Conclusion
In general I’m very impressed with the quality and speed of our progress since onboarding our new team members. At this rate we will easily achieve our goals before the end of the year and really get to see if Althea can scale to become a serious competitor to existing service providers.
