berlin-open-wireless-lab

DAWN

C2021–2026

berlin-open-wireless-lab / DAWN

DAWN

Decentralized WiFi Controller

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3Distinct people

6Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

476GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Decentralized WiFi Controller

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year6 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-12-07 17:06:19 UTC to 2026-05-28 15:10:36 UTC.

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	3
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2026 (partial)	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2

What Hacker News says

6 sources

jauntywundrkind·May 28, 2026

I'd used DAWN for band steering/roaming at my last place, which worked ok. uSteer is a little newer & is an official openwrt project. https://github.com/berlin-open-wireless-lab/DAWN https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dawn DAWN has a wild amount of knobs to tune, which aren't super well described. I haven't been running it since a single AP covers my current place very well. But it would be interesting to go evaluate DAWN & it's config with an LLM, to dice in & see more. uSteer too. Great write up, good information to share. This really is such an important next step for many people's wifi and it's documentation is pretty so-so.

In Indoor Wi-Fi Roaming with OpenWRT

jauntywundrkind·May 9, 2026

There's band steering. You absolutely do have control, if you opt to do so. On openwrt, DAWN or usteer can both help your APs to get sounding maps from clients and to tell them which AP to join. Looking at the sounding maps is very fun data to see: highly tecommend! The settings aren't the world's greatest but they are pretty good starts! https://github.com/berlin-open-wireless-lab/DAWN https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dawn Multiple APs are really nice because you can turn down the AP power, ideally, as you add more stations. Unfortunately I don't think you can tell a client to be quieter though; someone's laptop can be at 200mW tearing the hell out of the spectrum when everyone else is nicely conversing at 10-20mW.

In Wi is Fi: Understanding Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E/7/8 (802.11 n/AC/ax/be/bn)

porjo·Sep 4, 2022

I was just reviewing the TP-Link EAP225 which supports OpenWRT. And DAWN [0] can be used with OpenWRT for handling band steering. Does anyone have experience using it? Can you recommend it? [0] https://github.com/berlin-open-wireless-lab/DAWN

In TP-Link band-steers 2,4 to 5 GHz Wi-Fi even when the radio is off

rektide·Jul 30, 2022

It's not out-of-the-box perfect, but I've had decent luck using DAWN, which targets openwrt, to get decent bandsteering. I can always ssh in (I personally havent been interested in installing/trying the "luci" web interface) & move someone between bands if I need to. My understanding is it's typically thr network nit clients that is supposed to be in charge of bandsteering & that devices hanging on to what they lock on to is the norm, typical. Also, this setup works across & steers clients between my multiple access points! It's amazing being able to ssh in and see a map of what signals each AP sees. DAWN periodically asks clients to help map, so even if the AP's are on different bands, you can still compare what the signal would be if the node moved. We'ee finally living in a pretty good time for open source wifi. A pity how only a coupl

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e chips have support (select MediaTek and Qualcomm) but wow things have gotten much better. https://github.com/berlin-open-wireless-lab/DAWN

rektide·Jun 3, 2022

I'm a long term openwrt user, finally even set up DAWN[1] to orchestrate multiple APs (sometimes a win, sometimes worse than manually picking among each AP & each band (2.4/5) having it's own specific ssid/name). I really hate to say it, but even for the geeks, I'd generally recommend some kind of mesh product. A roommate installed a parallel Google mesh product & it worked so well, had such great coverage. Google spent hella time making this product good, thanks in part to Google Fiber. There's a great talk on their finding from Avery Penarunn back at the first netdevconf[2]. I'm sure many of the competing products are also very very capable. They have a level of reliable, just works intelligence, even over wifi mesh, that makes me envious. There's sadly little new news in the OpenWRT space. There's some on-the-cusp work with some new Qu

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alcomm chips that might start working in mere weeks or months. But we've been running the same wifi4 & wifi5 hardware for half a decade now, basically, with no real options. The Netgear X4S R7800 is still the go-to openwrt router. MediaTek has some wifi6 capable routers[3] targeted to the low end, which are nice & available & cheap & modern, which is great, but decidedly low end. Mesh just makes sense. Most devices have terrible wifi performance. Making them chat across weak or noisy links will hurt everyone. For most users, mesh products are quite affordable & imo a good improvement. [1] https://github.com/berlin-open-wireless-lab/DAWN [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZcHbD84j5Y [3] https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128_ax-wifi

In Ask HN: Decent Internet Router Recommendations?

rektide·Dec 7, 2021

Some of it is just a turn, a lack of will & spirit, an exploitation, as Tom seems to say: > That fewer startups are interested in contributing to open source in any significant way. Fewer still will open source major components of their product. And major companies with lots of existing contracts have started building their fortunes on open source in a way that feels - to me, on an emotional level - exploitative. Startups shouldn’t be their unpaid R&D department. But also, particularly with code, we are a much higher tech civilization than we used to be. We have much more advanced tools & libraries to help us, but the expectations & demands of users are much higher, what we make tends to be much more complex. It's harder for open-source to feel relevant, to want to get going on an open source path when the effort & expectations are going

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to be so much higher. I also think currently open source is out of sync with the demands of the time. Open source software- the application- is consigned to the margins when what folks expect from computing is connected, always-on, available computing. For open source to do what the commercial offerings do, we'd need to tell folks to set up SQL servers, hole punch their firewall & to set up dynamic DNS. Open source still thinks of itself as a competitor to win the desktop, but the desktop is irrelevant: computing has moved into the cloud. We haven't gotten significantly better, significantly more consistent at turning users into operators, into making operations better. With some rare exceptions like Yunohost[1], open source software remains stuck in a fairly legacy mode of computing, even though we have countless open source libraries for building cloudified computing. Even the computer geeks have mostly stopped caring. They run out & buy $1000+ of wifi gear, rather than learn openwrt (which now with DAWN[2] multi-AP controller, i regard as viable). WSL means less and less geeks will dabble with actual Linux environments, since Linux tools just work with little adaption & effort. The systems knowledge to make computing happen has turned into a skill of navigating AWS consoles & Terraform scripts, rather than hugging servers. The real world of computing, of doing for ourselves effervesces away, up, into the cloud, and it's hard to see how the idea of open-source can remain relevant when computing itself is dematerializing around us. I do think some general systems research & creative computing fabrics could start to tip the scales some. The long half-century of the application will, must, eventually meet some kind of reckoning, more general interconnected, intertwingularized, user-respecting forms of computing must start to emerge. I'm hoping open-source has a more viable role to play in that. And I think that eventually a resistance will form, will gel more; that works like Kubernetes are preconditions for personal users being able to build acceptably-modern computing capabilities for themselves & each other. Hope is far off, but I still, for sure, feel it. [1] https://yunohost.org/ [2] https://github.com/berlin-open-wireless-lab/DAWN

In Sharing in the Presence of Computers and Corporations