Hacker News Reader

Comment by laserb0y | Hacker News Reader

I've seen several bigger Meshtastic networks in Europe that suffer from a dramatic unreliability.

Everything beyond 1 Hop is often unusable. The public chat room only sees fragments of discussions. This causes big frustration within the community.

MT clients are just too chatty. That most Roles can act as a (delayed) Router was IMHO a bad design decision.

Also that they blocked the term "Meshcore" on their Reddit Sub leaves a bad taste. Both projects share similar problems - they should cooperate instead of fight each other.

View on HN

In slovenia and neigboring countries there's a huge mesh of probably hundreds of nodes, some connected via radio, some via mqtt with people only working on expending the mesh and nothing else....

the result is predictable... a few "test? can anyone see this?" every few days and most of the radio channel is used up by signalization between the nodes. Then somone adds a new node in some area further away (parents' place, work, whatever), sets up mqtt, connects two such meshes together, and we get the same 'test?' but now in italian.

Making it smaller (city-wide) and have people actually talk there would be much better, but for now, everyone just wants to make it bigger.

This is a big point; in the nyc Meshtastic network there are well over 1000 nodes now (up 10x in the last year) but in the public channels nobody has much interesting to say beyond testing

Blocking a "rival" standard isn't necessarily petty censorship, it can also be spam control. I check the sub once in a while and I definitely do not want to see the same "but meshcore" whining over and over and over again.

Honestly .. MC is very successful in terms reliability doing it their way. Ignoring that will with full force doesn't make MT better.

Hopefully MT catches up. Their GPLv3 license is much more attractive to me than the MC MIT.

I think both the Meshcore and Meshtastic communities have a problem with people being passive aggressive instead of being direct and upfront about the different tradeoffs chosen by those projects, and their consequences for various use cases. Unless those attitudes improve, keeping the forums separated is unfortunately one of the more straightforward ways to avoid flamewars and repetitive, circular arguments.

There are significant downsides to the changes Meshcore made to achieve more reliability in some use cases; it's absolutely not an all-around improvement that Meshtastic necessarily needs to "catch up" to, and downplaying or hiding the downsides doesn't help anyone. At the same time, Meshtastic proponents should be more honest about the scalability limitations of their approach.

That's true. Toxic people destroy projects and their communities.

There's only so much bandwidth available so pick and choose what the firmware is good at. MeshCore went all in on messaging and tracing. Meshtastic is a more noisy protocol which is perfect for camping and hiking in small groups.

The subreddit isn't the place where MT development happens - it's where users discuss stuff they do. If there was the occasional discussion of MC vs MT, that would be very healthy and helpful for both projects. But this is not what happens. The sub drowns in toxic flamewars. There's nothing to be learned from that in terms of development, and the subreddit just becomes noise i.e. spam.

Re: licensing, last thing I read was the MC was... at least awkward: a "core" being "open", and then some "modules" that you need to pay for (to run on your device). I don't really care for a project like this, even if they backpaddled from this scenario. I'd rather wait for yet another third option, that is free open source and would have the supposed protocol improvements.

The good thing is, after all, that the same LoRa radio devices can be flashed with one or the other, if I understood correctly.

Both have GitHub projects that you can compile firmware from. One is MIT, the other is aggressively GPL

I was just about to ask this: a non partisan honest comparison between Meshtastic and Meshcore for different use cases such as long/short range, congestion resistance with nodes growth, resilience against adverse condition, ease of integration with different software, etc. without fanboyism/hatred/shilling etc involved to form an opinion before starting buying hardware and diving into one of the technologies.

There's a decent comparison at https://www.austinmesh.org/learn/meshcore-vs-meshtastic/

The good news is that almost all Meshtastic hardware can be flashed with the MeshCore firmware (and vice versa). This makes it straightforward to dive into both relatively easily.

I wanted to fix this with my FreakWAN but I was never able to find a user base willing to validate the ideas of the routing I implemented. All the code is open source and easy to modify.

Write me if you are willing to experiment :)

There are plenty of network simulators around. Why no simulating it offline?

LoRa diverges too strongly when applied in the real world. There are quirks in the chip (Semtech in the latest revision did a few strange things), and in the way chirp modulation works (the one used by LoRa), that makes it a lot better to test in the field.

Hey, I just learned that you wrote the original dump1090. Thanks for that! Makes sense yhat you’re pretty good at RF stuff, eh?

> Also that they blocked the term "Meshcore" on their Reddit Sub leaves a bad taste. Both projects share similar problems - they should cooperate instead of fight each other.

Oh yeah I saw that behaviour on the lineageos irc too. Mentioning microG gets you instabanned there. Micro G is an excellent Google Play Services alternative which is open source. But the lineage guys hate it because they're afraid of pissing Google off.

It’s great amateur radio. Which I’ve learned is not about reliable communication. It is the sport of “can you here me now?”. Lots of tinkering and testing. The fun of Seeing the network open up when someone attaches a node to an airplane. Or occasional conversations that pop up. Set expectations low and get into appreciating direct EM wave communication.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com