network | larsklint.com

Farm WiFi Off The Grid with Ubiquiti and Solar

TL;DR; I made a Unifi camera work at my gate using solar power and long range WiFi. Also read my initial setup, and expansion with UDM-PRO and cameras to get the background.

First version of my solar powered @ubnt gate camera project. Outdoor rated cables and some tidy up still to be done. Write-up coming soon. 📡☀️ pic.twitter.com/lUc3fMf8WY

— Lars Klint 🌳🐏🚜 (@larsklint) June 2, 2020

Okay, I know. This networking exercise of my farm in country Australia has gone a bit further than I had planned, expected and anticipated. However, I am having a ton of fun with it, learning about active and passive PoE, NAS type hard drives, antenna radio patterns and so much more. It kinda blows my mind 🤯 how much there is to it. Soooo, why not add some complexity to the whole thing and add a camera at my gate. Where there is no power. Or network. Continue Reading

Farm WiFi Version 2 – Unifi, Dream Machine, Cameras and Oh So Much Cabling

If you haven’t read about farm WiFi Version 1, do that first.

Here is what happened. I spend some hard earned dollars on getting two Unifi AP-LR units and two Unifi Outdoor Mesh APs, as well as a 24-port switch and a cloud key to upgrade my oh so patchy WiFi on my farm. I had great feedback on that post from all sorts of people. Some were keen to hear more, some questioned some of my setup (I am a total network newbie), and Ubiquiti also noticed.

They messaged me and asked for more details on what I was trying to do and what my plans were. And a couple of weeks later they send a “care package” with more Unifi toys. I am not getting paid to write anything, I am not promoting their products in any way I wouldn’t do anyway when I like something, and they certainly aren’t telling me what to write. It is just what nice companies do. It is a win-win, as I get new bits to play with, set up and evaluate. Ubiquiti get some real world feedback, some public promotion from the community and everyone is happy.

Initially I had planned on getting a Unifi Security Gateway to handle firewall, access rules and DHCP, as well as 2-3 cameras to cover some portion of the property. As it turned out, it became rather more than that.

Unifi sent me 5 cameras, 2 airMax NanoStations, a FlexHD, a Dream Machine Pro and a partridge in a pear tree. Extremely generous. Which meant that now the really hard work could begin.