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SPUD – Simple Unified Dashboard for mesh networks

IT46 have been hard at work and have just made the first public release of SPUD (Simple Unified Dashboard), a wireless mesh network visualisation tool for BATMAN mesh networks and its users.

SPUD is a PHP based dashboard that communicates with the BATMAN visualization server and displays real time wireless link status. The software is written in CakePHP (a PHP-based MVC framework) and uses Google Maps API 1.3 for visualization.

SPUD is designed to be as simple as possible to use, and to enable teams, that have installed large amount of mesh nodes, to visualize their networks quickly.

Some of the core features of SPUD are:

  • Client management: Bulk import of clients from CSV file, Edit client position with Google Maps, Tracking of new clients
  • Link monitoring: Easy overview of active wireless links, Mesh quality in each direction of a wireless link
  • Customization: Colours and threshold values for link quality

See above and below for screenshots that shows some of the functionality of SPUD.  The source code is available via SVN at

svn co http://dev.villagetelco.org/svn/villagetelco/spud/trunk/

and the default configuration will monitor our demo site in Bo Kaap (Cape Town)

Detailed installation instructions are available at

http://spud.villagetelco.org/install (user: vt-admin pass: ouagadougou) or http://dev.villagetelco.org/trac/wiki/spud_install

We have set up a demo site of SPUD that visualizes the Bo Kaap network. The demo is available at: http://spud.villagatelco.org. Please feel free to play with it, and provide us your feedback!