Irdest: Decentralised ad-hoc wireless mesh communication
irde.st
irde.st
I would love it if one of these mesh wifi projects really made it somewhere. That would be very convenient for this project.
He's got a pinned tweet [3] that says "One of the key technologies which has helped in crowdsourced response to extreme weather disasters (fires floods hurricanes) these last years has been ability to monitor local emergency radio channels remotely. Let's get these everywhere. #raspberrypi #rtlsdr #scanner"
He (Benjamin Kuo) is a HAM Radio operator active during disasters.
It's different from what you wanted, but just putting it here.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/us/missing-hiker-found.ht...
The only reason cell networks work is that the telcos pay big money for getting access, power, and backhaul to places up high. No amount of power increases, modulation gain, reflector aperture, software, or anything else you can think up is going to get around the lack of line of sight.
Unless a decentralized mesh network has enough money to do this it will only ever work in specific regions where single individuals or groups can pay $$$ and cover large areas. Like in Seattle where the mountainous coastal terrain is useful for hamwan's network, or in mega-cities like New York where residents have skyscraper roof access for p2p wireless community ISPs.
There's such an odd divide between tech geeks who like to sit around and think about "p2p wireless decentralized mesh networks", and don't know of any network that doesn't use those buzzwords, and wireless ISP operators who actually build them in the real world despite never having heard the word "mesh".
Generally the networks started by the mesh geeks perform much worse, and have few, if any subscribers, despite the fact that topology and equipment are identical to a wireless ISP.
Source: was a mesh geek, started a company making open source software for p2p mesh networks, now it serves wireless ISPs, who tend to have 100x the hustle and professionalism of the mesh geeks.
Even if the answer is "the community that runs this one is friendlier", hey, that's a valid differentiation, okay. But seriously, there are ten bazillion wireless meshes now, what makes this one worthy of anyone's attention or effort?
Even if there are already similar projects, each next one may end up with a novel variation that could contribute to the broader understanding. Or even if not, even if it's just like all the others, it still has value for those learning from being involved.
Rust is not something we're going to be running on low power Pi-type boards in trees, or on the kind of hardware that's available to people with very limited resources.
So why write software in a language that isn't meant for and can't be compiled on modest hardware?
There’s even a whole section of the rust documentation about embedded development in rust. https://docs.rust-embedded.org/book/
Frankly, you won't run GCC on an MCU either.
But if all you have is an RPi, you can still run the Rust toolchain right on it, if a bit slowly; e.g. https://opensource.com/article/19/3/physical-computing-rust-...