Hi Rowan, Thanks for your information...
You definitely should not use so many wireless mice in the same room.
Yeah I figured there would be a bit much rf floating around in one room for things to work reliably. Maybe the best approach is to have touch-screens using an on-board keyboard, and then you don't need to have any keyboards and mice.
For each row have a wireless ethernet router pretty sure a hub/switch is cheaper, you can get 10/100 for under $20
I value getting rid of ethernet cables to each unit as a high priority. In fact I'd like to only feed +12V to each students desk. This would run the monitor. Then have a little box with a couple of 3 terminal regulator chips to feed in the +12V and produce +5V for the RPi and +3.3V for the breadboard logic. As NZ switches to fibre-optics broadband, then there should be a lot of ADSL modem/router/wifi boxes being chucked out. These may allow turning off the ADSL WAN, and using the wifi and having a wired ethernet port as the up-link to the teachers server / the internet. However I'm not sure if these would support 1Gb/s up-link, probably more likely to be 10/100Mb/s. Also, at a glance, there are options like the Huawei WS323 WiFi Access Point/Client/Repeater Wireless networking: 802.11b/g/n, 2.5GHz or 5G dual-band, with a 1 Gigabit Ethernet port at under $100 each. Maybe that would be a suitable alternative. If each wifi router is only allowing the connection (through MAC address filtering) of the 7 RPi's in it's row, and each is on a different wifi channel, then I figure that the rf floating around in the room shouldn't cause too many confliction problems. I dunno if a schools expectation would be that every student can simultaneously stream 1080p video, but if so, then it may be stretching the my networks capabilities[😉] cheers, Ian. ________________________________ From: wlug-bounces(a)list.waikato.ac.nz <wlug-bounces(a)list.waikato.ac.nz> on behalf of rowan schischka <rowanschischka(a)gmail.com> Sent: Sunday, 11 September 2016 10:56:58 a.m. To: wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: [wlug] On a similar DYI theme
28 x wireless keyboards and mice
For each row have a wireless ethernet router
You definitely should not use so many wireless mice in the same room. keyboards are ok but the interference and drops on the mice are frustrating. We used them in a room of about 16 poeple and we had to convert to wired. Also you might want to check if r pis bluetooth has drivers yet. pretty sure a hub/switch is cheaper, you can get 10/100 for under $20 -- Kind Regards Rowan Schischka
