Tiny Packet Network Progress

I had a chance to work more on the Tiny Packet Network (TPN) protocol that I had previously been calling TinyAPRS this weekend. I changed the protocol  a bit from my original ideas and now coded  a basic digipeater, but didn't have enough Arduino's to create enough nodes to really test it.

A friend dropped by with his Arduino (and coding knowledge) and I was then able to get two (2) full Digipeaters, one (1) monitor and a transmit only system that injects beacon packets. Below is a trace LOG from the monitor of the traffic on the network. The trace shows the Arduino time in mills (milliseconds) and then the packet data after the ">" symbol. In the figure below, the first two lines are beacons from node 33 and 34. Line 3 is a beacon from node 5. Notice that node 5's beacon hop count is 2 in that packet. Line 4 shows node 33 has digipeated node 5 and decremented the hop count  to 1. At line 5, you see node 34 digipeated node 5 as well. Then on line 6 node 34 digipeated node 33's packet from node 5 and the hop is now zero (this is a 2 hop digipeated packet!).

Once we add a few more features to the code it will be posted on SourceForge in the Distributed Power Node project. The code used here was version 0.33d based on 0.30g (Thanks Gary!).