AWD : Anaptyx Wireless Dynamics

AWD Mentioned in MuniWireless

admin — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 18:20:23 +0000

Full article here: http://www.muniwireless.com/2011/04/27/free-wifi-coming-to-the-boston-common-may-2011/

AWD chosen to bring Wi-Fi to Boston Common!

admin — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 16:31:51 +0000

Read the full article at: http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/beacon_hill/2011/04/unplugged_and_outdoors_free_wi.html

New AWD Support Portal

admin — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 17:27:06 +0000

In our efforts to continually improve customer service, today we are launching our new customer support portal. This will allow us to handle customer support issues in a more efficient manner and, additionally, RMA requests may now be completed and tracked online.

To access the new portal you may visit www.awdmesh.com as usual and click on “Support” or you may view it directly at http://support.awdmesh.com

New 900MhZ Outdoor Access Point!

admin — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 16:00:56 +0000

After nearly six months of testing and development, AWD is proud to announce the release of our dual radio 900MhZ access point today. This product is perfect for campgrounds, RV parks or any other dense foliage environments where standard 2.4 & 5GHz Wi-Fi frequencies won’t cut it. Bring wireless internet access to areas that were previously impossible to cover! The product designation for this new access point is the OD2-900N and features a 700mW, 900MhZ radio used for backhaul/mesh and 350mW 802.11N (2.4GHz) radio capable of 300Mbps used for client access.

This product is available for purchase immediately at an MSRP of $700 exclusively through Summit Technologies of Williston, VT. Summit Technologies may be reached through their web site at http://www.summittechnologies.biz/ or by phone at 802-846-3030.

Datasheets and further product information may be found here.

Zoneminder Installation DVD

admin — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 18:07:44 +0000

We love Zoneminder and use it for a lot of security related deployments – we have even played around with it before and are currently testing it for off site use. So far the results are promising so long as you’re using MPEG4 or H264 streaming. In any case, one of our engineers put this installations DVD together for use for free. It is basically an installation of Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop LTS wrapped together with Zoneminder and should make the job much easier for anyone! Follow the links below for use.

Zoneminder DVD Download

Zoneminder DVD MD5 Sum

Woodstock, VT

admin — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 13:00:33 +0000

This installation is with our last generation equipment, but still Turbo-A and we are seeing mesh speeds of over 30Mbps sustained! It is a great install in a cool town – very forward thinking group of people who continue to pursue a wireless vision for their town.

AWD Pricing Change

admin — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 17:07:45 +0000

Dear AWD Customers:
It has been an exciting ride for us thus far. In our first year, we have exceeded all of our expectations both in sales and technological advances. We have worked hard, and over the past year we have seen a revolutionary dual radio device, 802.11N client access and our first dashboard. Thousands of people have used AWD devices for a vast array of purposes across the globe, and as we look forward to what our second year has in store we are quite excited to bring things to the next level – we have many exciting changes and additions to our product line in store.

Along with technological advancements, part of moving forward for AWD includes expanding into new geographic territories and better serving existing ones. To be able to do such a thing, we have found it necessary to arrange relationships with a few key distributors who we will be rolling out over the coming few months. This change will require us to change the pricing on our product lineup effective immediately. From day one we have strived to provide a high end product to our customers at a very fair price. We did so with extremely low profit margins to get the word out there and now that we have made it through a crucial growth stage we must make adjustments to be able to continue onto the next level.

We do realize that the main reason we are here is because of our loyal and first customers. That being said, we have no intention of leaving those who supported AWD in the dark. This is why we are extending a special offer to anyone who bought AWD equipment in the past, or has already quoted a project using AWD equipment. If you file a registration with us in the next thirty (30) days, we will honor a special level of pricing that is very near to what you have paid in the past. We will do so indefinitely so long as you buy a minimum of 10 AWD wired or dual radio wireless products each year. For those who have not bought AWD equipment but have quoted this equipment, please contact us as well. If we can confirm your projects/quotes we will honor the same agreement for you so long as the initial purchase takes place within a reasonable period of time to be determined at our discretion. Please contactregistration@awdmesh.com for these inquiries.

As for everyone else, please be assured our prices will still be fair with relation to what our competitors offer at the same level of performance. For those who do not require this level of performance, or simply require lower cost device, you will be happy to know that our near term plans do include a more cost-effective wireless device offering good performance and technical features at a price point several factors lower than our past pricing.

Thank you again for everything – we look forward to continue to serving you in the future and we hope this is able to show our gratitude towards our first customers.

Sincerely,
Ken Carnesi
Lead Product Dev – AWD

AWD in the Field: University Mesh Install in SC

admin — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 18:14:13 +0000

This is a pretty cool deployment – a great group of people from Clemson University installed AWD equipment in a town in South Carolina to provide connection for a geological monitoring system. Was a very cool use of the equipment and quite impressive as the links are stable and quick, we see speeds of about 4Mbps three hops out here and many of these AP’s don’t have great line of sight so it really shows the capabilities off of the high powered OD2-N’s.

AWD Manufacturing Processes – Part 3: Final Assembly & Shop

admin — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 10:00:11 +0000

In the final post in this series on our production processes we will discuss final preparation and essentially what goes on in the shop at the AWD headquarters. Our shop is very efficient and is more of a study in short-term logistics than anything else. We receive freight shipments of all of our parts, all of which, with the except of the boards are made 100% in the United States.

The procedure is quite similar for all products – essentially every product starts with flashing our firmware and other technical preparations and end up either at final precision machining or one of several on-site workstations, where they are completely assembled and finished by hand. Once assembly is complete we box up and package the product and either that day or the next it is either stocked elsewhere or shipped to their final destination – rarely spending more than a few business days in the shop pictured here.

We hope you can take some time to check out the pictures we posted below – we took a few quick shots around the shop early yesterday morning and threw in a few other pictures we had lying around on our processes (and some of our toys) for good measure. We hope you have enjoyed this quick series – it is one of a few we will try to do in order to share our world with you and express the passion we have for what we do.

AWD Manufacturing Processes – Part 2: Injection Moulding & Finishing

admin — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:10:53 +0000

In part two of this blog series we will be discussing three more manufacturing processes: Injection Moulding, Powder Coating and Silkscreening.

First, off is injection moulding. This is the process used to create the white plastic top for our indoor wired and wireless routers or access points. Injection moulding is a very efficient method of creating multiple plastic parts, but requires much technical work behind it and can be quite expensive. The main work, expertise and expense comes from the actual creating of the mold. The reason for this being the mold can be quite large, and is CNC’ed out of two single blocks of metal. These two blocks make up the inverse (mold) for each half of the plastic piece we are manufacturing. Additionally, much work must go into thermodynamic design, as you must be concerned with several aspects, including:

1.) The speed at which the plastic flows.
2.) The points and times at which the plastic cools.
3.) Any points of friction.
4.) No edge must be a straight angle.
5.) Mold must be very accurate, clean and highly finished.

Particularly #4 is difficult and important because in order for the mold to eject properly we must create a slight (1 or 2 degree) angle on every side of the product. However, they are all equally important, as if the plastic was injected from too few locations, too hot, too slow or too cold we would experience issues with the mold.

A brief explanation video we found on YouTube as well as several other pictures on injection molding can be found below.

The second process is powder coating. This is how we paint and protect our products. Powder coating is usually used to create a hard finish that is tougher and of better finish quality than conventional paint. Unfortunately, we don’t have any pictures of this process on our particular product, but it a type of coating that is applied as a free-flowing, dry powder. The main difference between a conventional liquid paint and a powder coating is that the powder coating does not require a solvent to keep the binder and filler parts in a liquid suspension form. The coating is typically applied electrostatically and is then cured under heat to allow it to flow and form a “skin”. After application, the powder is exposed to elevated temperature, it begins to melt, flows out, and then chemically reacts to form a higher molecular weight polymer n a network-like structure. Curing normally occurs at 200°C (390°F) for 10 minutes.

Finally, after powder coating is finished, we apply silkscreen. This is what you see on our products for designations such as the LAN port or logo. Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image. Some pictures of a final product are included below.