I have put together a HOWTO on my blog for building a portable mesh node with VOIP and wifi. We use this setup at church buildings to get on the mesh where we can't install any equipment long term. It uses VOIP so anyone who knows how to use a phone can use it. Great little kit and not too difficult to build.
http://www.trevorsbench.com/portable-mesh-node-with-voip-and-wifi/
Here is a picture of a finished node:
With tripod and radio:
Feedback and questions welcome.
Nice project (shared your link to our group). I've done something similar. Instead of the ATA interfaces I just use a node tied to an access point. Then SIP back to the remote Raspbx with a couple used Android phones, connected to the access point over WiFi and out to the mesh network.
-Chad
Can you provide more information as to how you used the Android phones with SIP? What app did you load on them?
We use linphone:
http://www.linphone.org/
Looking through the linphone docs, you can place sip calls directly to each phone without a server. Do you use the raspbx to manage a directory or something? It would be pretty darn nice to just configure the phones to talk directly to each other on the mesh, dialing using the phone's hostname.
We use that to setup dial groups and shorter extensions. Direct dial from a ATA phone looks like this:
*4710*197*30*18 - basically dialing by ip
vs
103 with a server. We dial by IP if the server is down.
We also use Linphone to direct dial, but use AT&T analog telephones with Grandstream boxes. Those phones have built-in speed dial memories that are long enough
for the Linphone dial string. So it takes only one or two button pushes to make the call, and there is no central server. Of course we need to have a telephone directory with each telephone.
Bob W8ERD