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Comment by sparrish | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how this is different from Meshtastic. Can someone compare and contrast?

so far it seems like better routing protocol, the ability to set what path your packets take if needed, and some different ideas about roles on the network. i’ve been playing with it for a week or so and people at my hackerspace have been contributing and i’m excited to see how it does, but it’s not good enough to the point where everyone is just going to switch over. some board support and polish needed before that happens imo

Meshtastic has unicast next-hop routing since firmware version 2.6 released, like, a week ago.

About a month or so ago now in the alphas.

Meshtastic's routing system (up until this last version), wasn't great. I haven't tried the latest version, because it's gonna need to take a while for people to update their firmwares.

Also, a lot of nodes tend to flood their battery state for the entire network, which uses up the airtime for something that could be more important like routing information, and also wastes their battery.

Even though things like AlohaNet have been around for years, Meshtastic chose to reinvent the wheel. The primary difference is that Meshcore started with "routing" first, and then save the airtime and therefore battery for routing messages.

geerlingguy did a video on it, and it's highly worth while checking it out. I think he was kind enough to use the term "Beta".

Supposedly the new firmware from Meshtastic fixes a lot of this, but it's gonna be a while for people to upgrade, and I'm not too keen on wasting time again on something if it's not fit to work for it's stated purpose originally.

> Unlike Meshtastic, which is tailored for casual LoRa communication, or Reticulum, which offers advanced networking, MeshCore balances simplicity with scalability, making it ideal for custom embedded solutions., where devices (nodes) can communicate over long distances by relaying messages through intermediate nodes

Yeah... that doesn't say anything. "Advanced networking"?

Meshtastic can also communicate over long distances by relaying through other nodes.

So what's the difference?

Right now, Meshtastic's core comms protocol is based on flood messaging - no significant smart routing, although the Devs have recently introduced some route discovery features on private channels, but not in the public one.

MeshCore started out with the concept of static router nodes as well as clients, so it performs better if there is a router nearby to use, otherwise it falls back to flooding.

The previous version wasn't "flood" routing. Because flood routing would have worked better. I called it "spray and pray" routing.

It was something like this:

1. Router repeats first

2. Weakest repeating device by signal strength next

What if both of those options are in a basement, or say have a damaged antenna, or are miles in the opposite direction of where you want the signal to go?

By simply putting up a router somewhere you might be severely impacting the comms of people at your edge.

This ^.

I struggled to get messages delivered with Meshtastic in my location. I'll try Meshcore when I get some time.

To provide another perspective: where I live, I can basically reach the entire country if I’m lucky (Netherlands) or my entire city when I’m extremely unlucky. It totally depends on the amount of people / nodes strengthening the network. I’m deploying nodes near dead spots up in trees and the like, with solar panels and batteries, to work even better and without power.

why don't just contribute to Meshtastic then?

The devs involved apparently tried...then MeshCore became a thing.

You can read between the lines here.

Those are still very experimental and Reticulum is definitely a research project. So I don't mind them exploring different designs and ideas.

I believe the most important is to keep an option to be able to setup gateways between the different networks and if possible the messaging systems.

Like for example yggdrasil, tor, I2P dn42 and the clearnet are interconnected. What is really cool.

JAQing off eh?

Have folks ever tired to even communicate with the devs? They are the most toxic group of individuals that I have ever encountered. Saying that they act like children is insulting to little kids.

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