I am back at work on Iota, working in the evenings after my little girl is asleep and during my lunch breaks at work.

It has been slow going, and I am not where I wanted to be at this point, but I have something to show at least.

I am now liberated from the breadboards!

At the top right is a node without any sensors at the moment, and to the left of it a USB to serial adaptor to program it.

At the bottom is the bridge between the EeePC hub and the radio network.

The controller board in both cases is an Arduino Pro Mini clone based on the AVR ATMega328 chip.

It is running at 16MHz, and at that speed should be run from 5v, but as the radios need 3.3v, I am technically over clocking the AVR for the voltage, but so far it seems stable.

In hindsight I should have gotten the 3.3v version which has a slower crystal on board, but if the speed proves problematic, I can divide the clock through software, so it shouldn't be an issue.

Next steps

From here I need to get the EeePC updated and communicating with the other node over the radio.

From there I want to add sensors and LEDs to the node and continue developing the MQTT-SN software layer for communicating between the hub and nodes.