Funkfeuer – Live Network Map

Blender was used at the funkfeuer artlab 2007 in Kunsthaus Graz to render the status of the event's wireless network.

Dorian Santner writes:

Funkfeuer Graz creates a snapshot of the olsr network mesh in blender.

The free-access wireless lan funkfeuer graz uses the "Optimized Link State Routing" protocol (OLSR.org). It is a proactive link-state routing protocol that floods a full topology table to all nodes in the network which then compute optimal forwarding paths locally. Ideally for our 125 nodes mobile ad-hoc network and now we can create a geographical map of our network in blender.

All data parsing is done in blender itself, reading a xml-file (for the node-positions) and a graphviz-file (for the connection info). When you start the script it fetches the required info dynamically over the web and draws the status of the network connections in a blender scene. It uses curves to set the connections, with applied Circles as BevelObjects and Tapers to create the cloud mesh.

Links:

• Description
• .blend files