Meshtastic
meshtastic.org
meshtastic.org
We often sail in places where there's no communication infrastructure, or it is prohibitively expensive. With Meshtastic we can talk when somebody goes ashore, and the boat can send telemetry and alerts to the remote crew.
Some of our buddy boats also have Meshtastic on board so we can text chat with them instead of using VHF.
Here's a story describing this: https://blog.noforeignland.com/off-grid-boat-communications-...
The trickier part is to figure out the correct preset for more exotic locations. I've had to ask a couple of times from the local Meshtastic community group.
So to refine the gp's question: surely there's a way to push an update or sync with a script that can do this based on GPS coordinates, right?
I would think a syncing mechanism would be a big help anyways since regardless of the reliability of the GPS script you're still going to be doing this, right?
Though bigger reason likely is that very few people actually travel between different regions
Lots of LoRa stations nearby.
Perhaps someday the project will settle on a handful of sensible presets for different use cases. Even better would be if more of the options were managed dynamically by the software itself, things like adjusting timeouts and hops based on current network utilization and previous transmission success rate, or automatically tweaking the role based on the current mesh toplolgy, that sort of thing.
i installed a node week ago. honestly, it is somewhat underwhelming
I played a bit with them. There was one node anyway about 6 miles from me.
Proprietary mesh networks tend to become unusable garbage because they omit DoS, rate limits, and proper configuration for dense metropolitan uses, and tend to fail at investing in upkeep.
That would certainly be helpful, but even with current radios I can imagine a configuration process that sequentially scans different channels to achieve the same result, just a little slower.
Even with the latest radios available but not yet used by Meshtastic, it would be very hard to implement any kind of frequency-hopping scheme or variable bandwidth, without requiring mesh nodes to burn a lot more power sending and receiving+acknowledging across multiple modem settings to maintain reliability. LoRa as implemented by the chips used in affordable Meshtastic devices is really more suited to operating many small disjoint mesh networks on separate channels, not one large mesh network spanning multiple frequencies/bandwidths/etc. (Dropping the ad-hoc mesh aspect in favor of centralized coordination is pretty much the only way to scale up to large networks.)
My impression was that many of the folks who wanted a big shared mesh migrated to MeshCore, which I'm less familiar with. My use case is in fact a small disjoint mesh network, but even that requires proper configuration and can be unreliable due to things like misconfigured nodes (mine or others).
I'd be happy to specify the region and form factor (handheld, fixed router, mobile router, tracker) but it would be nice if the nodes could automatically configure the right role, rebroadcast mode, hop limit, timeouts, etc on their own. I'm not asserting it's possible, just that I don't otherwise see it breaking out of the hobbyist niche.
> A full scan would take hours.
My apologies, I misspoke, I agree that trying every frequency/bandwidth/spread factor/coding rate combination would be impractical, at least for battery-powered nodes. Instead of "scan different channels" I should have said cycling through the half-dozen modem presets for a specific region.
- Sideband: iOS/Android chat app (https://github.com/markqvist/Sideband)
- NomadNet: Desktop CLI chat app (https://github.com/markqvist/NomadNet)
- Rnode: Reference node hardware/firmware (https://unsigned.io/rnode/)
It's just not awesome. Especially compared to what you can do with ham radio.
It does seem like the RNode radios are a lot less mature but they seem to be aiming to be less of a toy.
Plus: encryption is heavy when bandwidth is limited and over radio waves we aren't even permitted to encrypt data most of the times.
Please don't read my comment as bringing down the project. I'm a fan, used everything it was produced but ultimately is unusable for serious applications on the current state. I really tried hard to adopt it.
But it is fairly easy to hack on. I have no idea how to debug things without USB serial connected, though.
Maybe a bit offtopic and not LoRa, but I've been looking at ESP32 and they include an ESPMesh for the WiFi radio with a promise of about 500 to 1000 meters range from what I read. It isn't the same range as LoRa, but it is "larger" bandwidth and for the price of 3 dollars per unit seems promising on urban areas to connect people. I'm trying it out now.
Also, it uses tons of CPU on legacy machines. It needs some rework. Not everyone it's a hipster with 256 or 32 bit colour terminals, shitty NerdFonts (nonstandards) and big displays.
And being written in Python3 makes it dog slow. Being rewritten in Go would get a few performance tweaks, (networking and GC there it's ideal), security and portability. But, please, no BubbleTea unless you can be sure it can work on a plain XTerm with 16 colors (I use Tango for readability, but 16 colors FFS). Keep 256 colours as an option.
Meshtastic at first glance seems silly. No routing, one spammer could mess up the whole thing. Hopefully this is better.
Just don't mention MeshCore anywhere around Meshtastic, or they'll kickban you.
Thats not the problem. And Ive also mentioned Meshcore as well on their discord with no threats of banning or anything of the sort. Ive also seen people come in the group, with "Meshtastic sucks and Meshcore is best", and the worst by admins was 'we have no problem discussing but that tone was overly harsh'.
Liam Kottle, the head of Meshcore ran the first Meshtastic map from grabbed MQTT data. However, he was grabbing and saving everything, including public channels, direct messages, GPS, telemetry. Everything. 1.5y ago, people were going to his map and snooping on Defcon Meshtastic DM's, since even 1 node who reported MQTT would send everything. And then, DMs were simply filtered by the UI, but were effectively encrypted by the same shared key.
Normally there was a general expectation that the data was ephemeral. Liam basically created and caused this data problem by saving and making available everything sent to MQTT.
Meshtastic devs ended up having to tighten down the public MQTT broker a bunch. They also made the client on phones be more restrictive what was done and sent to MQTT. Also made "OK to forward MQTT" flag in the data packets too. And 2.5 introduced PKI TOFU for direct messages to prevent leakage.
Aside the personnel difficulties, the technical issues with Meshcore are similar at node capacity too. Messages still dont get delivered near capacity. Core requires infrastructure nodes. Its more like APRS+LoRa than anything like a mesh.
Some people want Meshtastic to be rock-solid communication infrastructure for use in a doomsday or disaster scenario. Some people want to use it to undermine the importance of cellular communications networks. Some people want it to be used much like CB radio as a local public conversation channel. Some people envision it used mostly with stationary transmitters, while other people want to use it entirely with mobile nodes. I use it primarily for group location sharing (many to many), since the location sharing capabilities Apple and Google provide for their smartphone platforms only easily support one-to-one or one-to-several location sharing.
Reticulum: full network stack (alternative to IP), mesh, focus on low-speed, unreliable connections. Transport layer agnostic. Current 'Hardware drivers' are written for LoRa, Internet Tunnels, Wifi, Amateur radio.
Reticulum sounds great? It is, but still has 2 problems: 1. The only complete & stable implementation is written in Python and 2. The existing end-user applications have confusing and complex UIs (except for the command-line tools for remote shell and file copy).
2024 (335 points, 79 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829448
2022 (249 points, 90 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016142
2020 (620 points, 168 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540066
Meshtastic's Opposition to Proposed Changes on 900 MHz Band - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41242091 - Aug 2024 (16 comments)
Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829448 - Jan 2024 (78 comments)
Meshtastic is an encrypted communications platform for the Lora RF protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016142 - July 2022 (88 comments)
We're making an open-source $30 GPS/mesh radio, would like advice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540066 - March 2020 (166 comments)
Here is part of the Berlin mesh https://potatomesh.net/
This has been our experience in the Greater Boston Mesh.
Another forthcoming alternative will be satellite-based chat using phones.
Where the magic potentially kicks in is the mesh hops. With those you can reach much further by jumping from one node to another.
It's not even close to satellite comms in reach or reliability, but it also requires no infrastructure, no licensing, and no subscriptions.
I have two of the LilyGo units and want to hook one up to the computer and then carry the other one with me.
Been more fun to take it camping and stuff to play around with with friends.
Want to try and send one up in an RC plane soon.
You end up finding and chatting (often off-mesh!) with people who are within Lora-mesh-distance of you, who have similar interests.
I was previously a fan, but I'd never seen behavior like that from an "open source" project.
There's a Zero Retries article recently with a critical review of meshtastic. Or find my comments on meshtastic here.
If anything they showed there's demand for a public mesh. Unfortunately, they didn't want to learn from AlohaNet or any of the other meshes.
Do you have a link? I went through recent ZT issues and didn't find what you're referring to
I created a client Linux: https://gitlab.com/kop316/gtk-meshtastic-client and even posted it on their discussion page: https://github.com/orgs/meshtastic/discussions/99 . One of the maintainers responded positively to me: https://github.com/orgs/meshtastic/discussions/99#discussion... .