MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code
blog.meshcore.io
blog.meshcore.io
[1] https://reticulum.network/ [2] https://lilygo.cc/products/t-echo-lilygo [3] https://github.com/torlando-tech/columba
Only very very small testbeds.
It's so much fun with little pages, message boards and random people hitting you up for a chat. I brought up my own transport node and propagation node too to contribute to the mesh.
Is there still a reason to do this?
https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/wiki/Community-Node-L...
takes away some of the fun of imagining the SHTF-all-corporate-infrastructure-is-gone scenario i guess but i think that for realistic mesh networking applications it’s cool to build out many infrastructure types and enjoy the fact that the mesh will reconfigure itself realtime across a variety of scenarios.
My friend is across town and I should be able to hit him with the line of sight meshtastic repeater from my house, but I've never been able to.
OTOH, we can hear each other clear on any of the ham bands.
Lora seems to be a great technology for remote sensors within a 1km of each other that can transmit occasional data. But once that single channel fills up, the channel stops working.
Why not anymore? I know meshtastic has dumb routing but I thought Meshcore was much better.
I think things like this are at high risk of having perfect be the enemy of good, but I’m not exactly in my comfort zone technically.
I would like to disagree with you here that perfect is the enemy of good for mesh networking. It's not that meshtastic is good, it's not. But the barrier to get to good is far harder than the offerings. There are three primary issues.
1. Lora can typically only receive and listen on one channel at a time. This prevents listening and transmitting on anything but the one channel. If you could have multiple channels, the incidence of radios stomping on each others signals would go down.
2. The FCC limits 900MHz unlicensed operators to 1W of effective radiated power, and Lora really isn't optimized to make that 1W go as far as possible.
3. A good mesh network will have reliable delivery and routing. Meshtastic is more "spray and pray".
FT8 works very well as a digital modulation, and it solves the first two, but it doesn't solve #3 even though it makes it so much easier to design a solution for #3.
For a real life example: FT8 on 5W of RF power can often get my signal from North America to South America, Canada, Australia, Japan, etc.
If you listen to 14.074MHz, that's the channel that primarily is used for FT8 on the 20 meter band. Pick a random Web SDR from this list [0] and tune to that frequency and set it to USB (Upper Side Band). The channel width is only 3Khz, but each one of those squiggly lines is one station transmitting a signal.
I was getting very good signals with this one [1].
They have a decent range (15 miles or more) so depending on how rural you are, you might be able to create a line of repeaters back to a major population center.
Your point still stands though.
Someone has to start up the area! (I live in nowhere maine).
So you basically eliminate futzing around with the hard parts until you understand the reticulum network itself.
Basically work your way down the OSI model instead of working your way up it.
I'm sorry but are you serious? That map shows 224 nodes in the world, fewer than 30 in the entire Western hemisphere. And only 24 in the world are using LoRa? Meshcore has 38,000 nodes, Meshtastic 10,000. Those two projects can actually be said to have "tons" of nodes.
It hurts your credibility. I trusted you, spent time trying to debug the map, thinking that something was wrong on my end... why am I only seeing 224 when there should be "tons", is there a filter, are these just super nodes....
So I looked into it because of what you said, but you raised expectations so much that I feel nothing but disappointment.
I was referring to the TCP/IP, I2P and yggdrasil endpoints. And regardless, "tons" was an unnecessary exaggeration.
based upon the announce stream coming through my local node, i am seeing around 14k unique identities advertising over 21k unique application endpoints (destinations) over the course of the past month or so that i’ve been tracking it.
at the very least, try it. maybe it's simpler than you think
Different countries allow unlicensed use on different frequencies. Look up which is correct for your location.
Neat concept but so many footguns that (imo) it’s not really sustainable to try bootstrapping.
Specifically, I had tried to port the stack to Rust no-std to use on nrf52 LoRA devices to use/abuse the existing MeshCore network to deliver reticulum packets. Turned out to be a nightmare just trying to figure out if my packets were even correctly formed.
although, i’ve already done real time voice calls over 1 hop of reticulum lora on and it works pretty ok.
edit - community wiki with getting started instructions is here:
Also great for position tracking, sensor data or motion detection etc.
I know a few hams that are chill and they are precious doves. I know quite a few more who I won't even engage with for fear of crossing them and them dedicating their lives to making mine hell. Because I've seen them do it to others.
That's not _just_ the hams, mind you. This behavior is overrepresented in hackerspaces in general. But there's a lot of overlap between those groups. Hasn't changed much in the 40-some-odd years I've been involved there either.
I always found it interesting how many useful little apps hams write, keep them closed source and then...die.
I’ve been sniffing around it as a hobby for decades but there are just a ton of people involved that clearly are exorcising trauma from being bullied or feeling marginalized in their life on a whole. Following and enforcing the rules seemed like the beef big draw for a sadly large chunk of them.
There is also a fair bit of demographics at play. Many of the people writing these little applications grew up and imprinted before open source was much of a thing.
Yes, old mildly misogynist, mildly racist, wellakshually, holier than thou, pro-trumper types.
I was there at Dayton Hamvention (2024) when they had to turn off the 2M repeater because 2 or 3 of them got into a screaming match over trump.
Naturally, I skipped over any trump-flag hanging booth. But the hatred and extreme conservatism is everywhere in the community.
And its not my community any longer. I let my license lapse, and I will not renew. I also sold my radios, except for 2 2M handhelds, just on the off case SHTF.
I'm a radio hacker, not a ham. I'm no liddy elmer. And nor will I perpetrate shit like YL (you g lady) or OL (old lady), which is common vernacular.
Hams act super gatekeepey and act insanely protective/defensive around things that don't actually belong to them. They tend to have a high sense of self-importance around their skillset and try to do their own "enforcement" of rules that they feel empowered to harass people about. Hams tend to be "fixated persons". They care about their personal capabilities and usually some made up authority they think that gives them. All so they can just endlessly chirp hello world at each other. They developed a skillset and then don't do anything useful for the community with it. Notice I said the community and not their community. They love building insular clubs. They act like authority figures _across the whole damn spectrum_ when their purview is tiny.
The coolest radio hacker I ever met was an ex Army radio guy and Desert Storm vet. He ran a licensed LPFM station somewhere in the rust belt but with a pirate radio mindset. Their transmit power was way above what the license allowed but they also weren't bothering anyone :). His station ran afrocentric community/educational content and he ran after school programs teaching teens in his community brodcasting/radio/electronics skills. He helped several of them obtain scholarships. I've rarely if ever seen hams do anything nearly that cool.
Like with roads and cars, radio spectrum is a very limited and very shared resource, and there has to be some regulation, or else some Elon Musk-type person would already take it for themselves for a commercial reason.
It's also self-policed, so that means that hams have to find the problematic entities and hope that authorities with legal power act on those reports.
The devices can also be uncertified (self-certified by a ham technically), so you can cause all sorts of havoc for many other entities, like actual emergency services (a case not long ago in US) or worse.
If you are not able, or for some reason or another don't want to get licenced, there are other ways to communicate, like mentioned meshtastic, which doesn't require a licence on ISM bands, or PMR/FRS radios (or gmrs in us, which does require a licence but you don't have to learn the radio basics for the exam).
Again, like with roads and cars, you expect others there to be mentally capable enough to pass that simple exam and follow the basic rules on the air. If not, they can get a bicycle and argue on the bicycle lane with other cyclists. And the ham exam is much cheaper and easier than a driving exam (in most developed countries at least, the driving one costs 1keur++ if you finish optimally, whereas over here, a full intro to ham course (a few weeks, usually on zoom) with a printed book and the actual exam costs <100eur, even less with a pdf instead of a book)
The problem is hams - the people who are habitually are on amateur radio.
I find them to be incredibly anti-digital, holier than thou, loud about hard-conservative positions, misogynist, racist, and more. And when Ive tried to further the art and science of radio comms, hams are some of the first to talk down what I contributed.
They are people who I dont, and dont want to associate myself with.
Ive also known others that made that assumption when I said I was a ham. Lots of people have had those experiences, and also chosen not to associate with them.
I'm sure this doesnt apply to "all Hams". It does apply to a supermajority in the USA, enough to say that I do not want to be a ham any longer. I already refused to communicate with them, nor associate with them.
Frankly I'm surprised to see this here. Hackers have had more than their share of hurtful stereotype applied to both our hobby and our personality. We should know better. But perhaps there's a generational divide at work there.
The "secret, encrypted, private" chats correlate more with random "doomsday preppers", and younger non-hams (cheap, no need to get licenced). Many of those people buy (ham) radios too ("for emergencies", can't transmit legally anyway), but don't really contribute to anything. Emergencies are handled by trained groups of hams when/if they're called to help by whatever proper agency needs help with communications.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
> No provision of these rules prevents the use by an amateur station of any means of radiocommunication at its disposal to provide essential communication needs in connection with the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection of property when normal communication systems are not available.
That rule applies only to amateur stations (it says so right in the text!), not unlicenced individuals. What an amateur station is is defined in the beggining of the document, and yes, that requires the a duly-authroized (licenced) operator.
The last thing you want in an emergency event is some prepper with a baofeng transmitting on a repeaters frequency without a subtone set (because he's too stupid to pass an exam that 10yo kids can pass) effectively jamming it for proper emergency users. The other thing is, that chances are no one will actually hear you, especially on simplex. With tools like garmin inreach, carrying an HT with you instead of something proper and relying on that to save you in a time of need is just stupid.
Ham radio is like driving, you need experience to do it, and even some experienced people still do it badly. Trying to figure out how to drive by reading a car manual while the flood waters are rising is going to be a pretty bad experience.
Ham radios don't just appear, someone has to buy them, buying one without getting a proper licence is just stupid.... but many (especially americans) do so. There is GMRS, there is FRS, people could take those radios, try them out when not in an emergency, but nope... everyone wants that uv-5r for some reason.
Every one of those preppers should get licenced first, go to some hiking trail, some remote..ish pota park and try to do an unspotter POTA activation there... and after failing horribly, they'll rethink their emergency communications. Somehow even licenced hams (about which I assume none actually tried doing an unspotted pota from some hiking trail) support and spread the "just buy a baofeng for emergencies". In reality... they're useless in most cases. If you're somewhere remote, no one will hear you anyway, and if you're stuck at home, having something like a starlink will actually help you reach someone, much better than a radio, especially a handheld 2m/70cm one. You might get some good but useless DX with an HF one, but you won't be setting up an NVIS antenna in a snow storm.
But hey... try explaining that to preppers.
If someone had a heart attack, somewhere remote enough, that there is no cell signal, using a GMRS radio will have the same effect and range than a ham radio (i'm talking about 5W HTs here). Using something like a garmin inreach would actually get them help, but still, preppers want their baofengs, and for some reason don't want the *g models. That's why i get bothered when people promote ham radios, especially baofengs for emergencies, because they'll be useless in most cases and people who don't know that, will rely on them instead of getting a proper tool for the job. Many of those even have that in their pockets right now (some samsungs and iphone can do satellite communications already). Promoting the "you don't need a licence in emergencies" and then turning to "you'll be breaking the law anyway but who cares" mentality means that people don't learn even the basics (if they did, they'd be able to pass the exam) but still rely on those radios to get help.. and in turn, people will die because of that.
As i said before.. if you have a heart attack in the middle of nowhere, a baofeng won't get you help. If you went with gmrs/frs, you'd test it out and see the limited range and that no one is actually listening out there (unless arranged, and that person is in simplex range), if you get licenced, then you'd do the same, call out cqs into the void until you got bored, but if you do the "just buy one, you don't need licences..." (even if you do need to be licenced), people will be using that radio for the first time during an active emergency and fail in getting help with them. Stop promoting the untrue myth of getting help with a ham radio, instead offer proper tools for the job and people will actually be able to get help.
It's just a word I like to use, it has a nice sound to it.
1. Amateur pilots
2. People late in their years getting into martials arts for the first time (will be the loudest "KIYA"s in the class and always doing the most aggressive deep bows lol)
3. Non libertarian gun nuts. Oh buddy the attention they pay to everything from how you load your gun at the range to how you've had it packed in your car.
I have specific individuals in mind for each of these categories and I say this without ill intent, I'm not trying to disparage this behavior, it just seems to be a specific kinda thing, where following the exact letter of written direction seems to be half the fun for them.
This in opposition to some other types I know who aren't having fun unless SOME rule is being broken...
You're probably more correct, but not having the FCC as a barrier to entry using $20 hardware means a passing curiosity becomes me installing a repeater on our roof with a cavity filter that reaches half a city. It's super fun.
I was using a vibe coded UI (unrelated to this guy) that wasn't super disclosed and each dot revision a new basic thing broke. One I couldn't upgrade the firmware without a full reflash. Now I have to turn bluetooth off and back on to connect to it each time. In both cases it worked fine before that revision came out.
Was it because of vibe coding? I mean... it sure seems likely. Maybe it just needs actual testing?
At the same time it is seemingly the only UI firmware that supports bluetooth to my phone, uses map tiles on an SD card to show GPS maps (I have a tdeck so it has an LCD suitable for it), and runs on a tdeck. Oh, and our local channel names are too long for the ripple firmware (perhaps fixed by now) and the channel number limit was like 4? Maybe 10? Arbitrarily low in any case.
So like... I'm still using this vibe coded UI that breaks some new basic functionality each revision. I can connect to it over bluetooth (even if it's now unreliable), I can use my literally like 1 million map tiles with the GPS, I can actually enter the channel names, and I can have up to 20 channels.
They always want to posture as if they'll be some critical service every emergency responder comes running to in a major disaster and it rarely if ever happens.
In the interests of not reinventing the wheel, you can see here in the same thread the comment from many other posters about the problems that they have with the behavior, attitude, and perspective of many ham radio operators.
Most of the world just collects dx entities like pokemon, pota/sota locations, backpain complaints on nets and argue if ft8 counts or not for anything.
Similarly, for all the effort that people put forth to do EME and get bidirectional traffic with some tiny data payload bounced off the moon, they could be engineering real world production systems that do something cool with real, existing LEO, MEO, geostationary two way satellite data systems, accomplishing some useful purpose. Or at least doing something like cubesat ham radio traffic relays to carry a useful payload.
A great deal of what analog ham radio enthusiasts seem to care about falls into the category of being a dilettante in my opinion and has very little bearing on building serious networks that carry traffic/payloads people will rely upon .
But hey, like with everest, you don't have to do EME or collect countries if you don't want, nor you have to climb different mountain tops, hike the trails, etc. You don't even need to travel, it's cheaper just to see everything on youtube.
Some people like their hobbies, and if that hobby is to climb high mountains or reach as many countries as possible, then why not? Amateur radio is a hobby, if you want to work on eg. starlink, they could ne hiring.
There are many different niches in the amateur radio hobby. Some people want to buy off the shelf radios and antennas to make contacts over the air. Some people want to experiment with their homebrew designs and see how far their signal reaches. Some people want to experiment with very low power radios. Some people (including a Nobel prize winner!) want to experiment with new digital communication protocols for amateur radio use. And yes, some people want to use amateur radio for emergency communication purposes.
Why is it so wasteful for any of these groups to do what they're doing instead of applying their skills to something "useful"? Why is it any more wasteful than participants in other hobbies? That also ignores the fact that many amateur radio operators _do_ apply themselves to "useful" things: they're electrical engineers, physicists, software engineers, educators, military or emergency personnel, etc.
It's a hobby. "Let people enjoy things". Please remember this: it's a hobby. It's right there in the name: amateur radio. We're not trying to be world-class industry-leading RF engineers.
No, not everything in the world has to be utilitarian or accomplish a purpose. But amateur radio is continually living in the past, their entire communication paradigm is often based on something akin to circuit-switched networking when the packet based networking world passed them by quite some years ago.
Go look at the budget documents for the tower sites and entire radio communication networks that support public safety networks (police, fire, ambulance) on a scale of somewhere the size of King County, WA. Properly engineered hilltop tower sites with well maintained generators, redundant radio links, etc. Amateurs just don't have the resources to do these things properly and are a distraction at best.
My opinion is not new or novel - the people who built the att long lines microwave network in the pre fiber optic era very rarely if ever had anything to do with ham radio. Persons concerned with actual mission critical emergency communication systems learn the hard way that amateur dilettantes just don't have the financial resources or time to do it properly.
If you want to build an emergency communications network, it's going to cost money in real equipment and paying for the man hours of full time equivalent employees to build and run it.
I think it's totally sensible for the organization to want to have some level of control over what gets their label on it -- the Wi-Fi people wouldn't be very happy about someone slapping their logo all over a bunch of completely incompatible hardware.
Simple. Follow the money. Meshcore has more than 100k of users, repeaters are cropping up like weeds across the world. And that means there is a serious incentive to "cash out".
Notably, the person "cashing out" here wasn't involved in Meshcore firmware or app development, but in marketing.
But while in 3d printing, outside of hardware, that difference often feels confused (eg, I've seen the Multiboard creator post compliments online about models that blatantly violate his own license), in radio the difference often feels hostile. You have OpenGD77, for example, with its 'we were never GPL' rug-pull that was likely illegal (they had outside contributions) [1]. You have Meshcore with its 'we are open source, except...', and, as you can see in this thread, a difficulty actually finding parts of the code. You have the heavy cultural push against uSDX (seemingly open hardware+source) toward truSDX (DRM-encumbered), and what seems like the quiet acceptance of things like QMX, where you can solder together a radio with DRM that prevents you from installing your own firmware. You even have digital modes that are legally required to be publicly documented, and actually aren't in any meaningful way: VARA FM is probably the worst offender [2], but even modes that are in-crowd enough to be advertised in FCC license exam questions are often effectively proprietary and legally dubious.
What's particularly foreign to me about the culture is that oftentimes, much of the community seems to support behavior that seems malicious from an open source perspective, and attack the open source proponents.
[1]: https://hackmd.io/@ajorg/opengd77-is-closed [2]: https://themodernham.com/reverse-engineering-vara-fm-part-1-...
>And, he’s kept that small detail a secret - that it’s all majority vibe coded.
Without any more context, I am highly suspicious of this framing.
1) Someone "taking over" the ecosystem seems like an entirely different issue. How is this possible? Does it mean he's publishing things and people want to use them?
2) Is the code bad? It sounds like they had no idea he was using AI. That seems to imply there was nothing wrong with the code as-is. Why not judge it on it's merits?
>The team didn’t feel it was our place to protest, until we recently discovered that Andy applied for the MeshCore Trademark (on the 29th March, according to filings) and didn’t tell any of us.
Taking this at face value, this is indeed hostile and bad.
But no, I'm not going to get outraged that someone is simply using Claude Code.
Now the trademark take over seems crazy especially given Andy hasn't contributed to the github project, only personal for profit add ons.
I do also think that the meshcore core team have "tacked on" and tried to enforce a stronger narrative with their anti ai coding bias.
In that context it is quite logical to take a trademark out once the project is mature enough so you can profit off other people's work.
Considering their user base does not like the hidden vibe coded idea I don't think this is bias but a sane rationalisation.
Especially when they try to hide that they were using those tools in the first place
Can you elaborate on this?
I'd agree that is problematic. But that's not what the article said. The article just said he was using Claude Code a lot. It's ridiculous to equivocate those two things. That's what I have an issue with.
Anyone that has used AI at all knows this isn't how it works. AI is extremely good at producing plausible-but-wrong outputs. It's literally optimised for plausibility, which happens to coincide with correctness a lot of the time. When it doesn't you get code that seems good and is therefore very difficult to judge on its merits.
With human written code it's a lot easier to tell if it's good or not.
There are exceptions to this - usually if you have some kind of oracle like that security work that used AddressSanitizer to verify security bugs, or if you're cloning a project you can easily compare the behaviour to the original project. Most of the time you don't have that luxury though.
The vibecoder was on MeshOS, which indeed is not open source
Then you ask them to actually find a source file for the apps and they go quiet. It's wild how much it looks like open source from a casual glance.
Also, citation needed:
> With human written code it's a lot easier to tell if it's good or not
You're assuming the thing in question - that it's just AI slop. They dont offer any insight on that - they merely say he used Claude Code a lot. It shows a real lack of understanding of AI tools to equivocate those two things.
"Sooo productive", sure, buddy, and when it breaks you have no idea why it broke and ultimately you don't know the codebase. Instructions.md containing:
``` * make no mistakes * don't hallucinate ```
Is the clear-cut evidence that we are speed running towards a technological apocalypse. Ironically, I'm in favour of it: if the house has to burn down for things to get better and people to get back to using their brains, I'm all for it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_of_uncertainty
It was fun and cheap to set up, but I look forward to something with better messaging persistence so you can at least reliably not miss stuff.
If there ever where a more serious situation where my life depended on one of these meshes, I would be feeling pretty uneasy. They are absolutely not reliable enough to even consider such a thing. I suppose they might be better than nothing.
To say nothing of what is required to set up the devices. I wanted to put a full dev system on a raspberry pi 3 just so it would all be in one place and I could work on it when in a location with no internet - it ran out of memory trying to compile the massive web app that is the default client interface.
Can you name the game? Meshtastic has got me thinking about that kind of stuff.
There were 4 or 5 "color" teams. Each one carries a meshtastic node, and they all report to a central server back at base. The play field was roughly a square mile divided up into a grid of smaller squares. If you walk into one and it's past the cooldown time, it claims it for your team. Most squares at the end of two hours wins. The server would send out updates over meshtastic also: "Blue captures H12" "Red has 18", etc. If you were at the base station, you got to see it all play out live on a big map.
There was another one played at night which was a hide and seek game / capture the flag sort of game. It would tell the seekers some limited information about the seekers, and each side had special functions they could use. Hiders could "go invisible" or fake their location for a certain time. Seekers could call a limited number of "drone strikes" on different squares. The game ends when either the hiders are caught, or they make it to a specific target location.
Lots of possibility for that sort of thing with Meshtastic. I guess either could have run on a phone since now even rural camping areas have decent cell coverage these days, but that's not quite as impressive.
Get a basestation from Mikrotik and use Chirpstack as backend.
This setup is commercially very very battlefield proven.
We have a pretty big meshtastic/meshcore / reticulum scene in Taiwan organized through g0v's civic defense group. It's a nontrivial issue for us when the PRC keeps cutting our cables - which is why Audrey Tang was hitting up Starlink back when they were the digital minister.
Basically we very much may need these secondary networks someday.
I really want to get plausible "Walkaway" intranet set up here with e.g. mirrored Wikipedia and whatnot, I don't know enough yet to do that though.
https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/G0v%E9%9B%B6%E6%99%82%E6%94%B...
My local mesh was testing out meshcore last week, this definitely kills my interest too
You don't have to use the closed source app; there's an open-source client too, there are Blackberry-style client devices which don't require an app at all, and all the actual firmware is open source (MIT).
Worth noting that the Blackberry-style devices are also closed source and the hardware and software is way worse than Blackberry was 22 years ago.[0]
[0] https://mtlynch.io/first-impressions-of-meshcore/#this-is-no...
I wasn't expecting the T-Deck to be anything more sophisticated than a walkie-talkie for SMS, but it's a bummer than the UI code isn't open.
The closed client isn't needed anymore.
The radio API and firmware is open; I have no ire for people who choose to make software closed source so that it can be monetized when there are SO many other options that in many cases supersede the functionality of the closed source option.
It is essential to disclose it.
All over the internet people are putting up vibe coded projects and no one says that's what it is up front. They all just say "I made this" and they are more than happy to take in the adulation of people impressed that they made something with an animated pattern.
Then when they finally admit that they wrote nothing and don't know how any of it works people start to say "nothing wrong with using ai", as if using it is the same as copying it verbatim, not understanding anything and taking complete credit as if you wrote it while lying about how it was used.
Just a word of caution, claude code might look impressive if your knowledge is shallow or intermediate in a topic, but if you know what you’re doing, once you dig deeper it starts to introduce plenty of scope creeps into your code base, piling one on top of another that you won’t even recognize your own code shortly.
[1]: https://meshcore.io
But it sure seems interesting how every time I hear about someone just doing a “rewrite it all with AI“ they seem to turn out to be a giant jerk.
Maybe not the only one. I don’t know enough backstory to judge how trustworthy this post is.
But the signal to noise ratio on my little test above seems pretty good.
It's ridiculous to me that they're concerned about the trustworthiness of AI-generated code when their code quality is so low. They don't even have automated tests and ignore attempts to add them.[0, 1, 2, 3]
Last I checked, there's little validity checking in the code, so it's possible to broadcast nonsense values (like GPS coordinates outside of Earth's bounds) and the code happily accepts it.
And that's fine if they're just like a scrappy upstart doing their best, but it annoys me to be so high and mighty about their code quality when they don't invest in it.
I really want to like MeshCore but I feel like its stewardship makes it hard. The main two people I know running it are Scott Powell and Liam Cottle, both of whom are trying to build businesses on closed-source layers on top of the firmware. I don't think there's anything wrong with an open-core business model (I ran such a business myself), but it creates perverse incentives where the core maintainers try to suppress information about the open-source alternatives and push their own closed-source paid products.
Also, MeshCore's recommended broadcast settings for the US are illegal.[4] I emailed the Liam and Scott about this months ago, and they ignored me.
[0] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/pull/925
[1] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/1059
[2] https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/pull/1065
Also, I'm assuming we're in agreement that software should not accept invalid GPS coordinates from untrusted peers regardless of semantics about whether or not they're within Earth's bounds.
Circular coordinates wrap around, cartesian coordinates don't.
I can't read that without assuming the real intent is to deliver bombs accurately, but the startup pitching it knows that'd get bad press, and the investors all know exactly what it really means...
The main reason both Meshtastic and MeshCore have location data as a part of the protocol is because they emerged from the Ham community which has always taken its role in search and rescue seriously, and because it also appealed early on for other off-grid uses like hiking.
This is also a loaded question. The only specifics they've offered are that he simply used Claude Code. Um... OK? Do the tests pass? Did his changes add any security flaws? Regressions that were untested?
Agreed, but at least it's somewhat sensibly structured. AI? Good lord you'll end up with a slopaghetti mess.
> They don't even have automated tests and ignore attempts to add them.[0, 1, 2, 3]
Two people, 540 issues and 270 PRs open at the moment. Not wanting to be that guy... but do the math. The reviewer team is small as hell and after this drama (which probably kept both of them busy with BS) they'll likely be even less willing to trust others.
If you want to stand a better chance at getting your code into other people's hands, go and contact the person behind the Evo fork. IIRC he's part of Hansemesh, Germany's biggest regional MC.
I have heard indirectly multiple times now that the only two ways to get a PR of interest merged is to either gather enough people to Like the issue on Github or to join the Discord and ask.
First, I don't know if their interpretation of the rules is correct. For the sake of argument, I'll assume it is. More importantly, most other people in that thread seem to be going along with the idea that it is correct. This is how it reads to me:
Submitter: We're violating the rules and should make this change.
Replier 1: That change would be inconvenient in Seattle so we're not doing it.
Replier 2: It wouldn't work well in Boston, either, so it's a no-go.
Part of me wants to shake them. This isn't 'Nam. There are rules. Whatever you think about the FCC regulations, they're not voluntary, and they certainly don't have an opt-out for "it wouldn't work as well that way". To a first approximation, everyone else using the public airwaves is more or less following the law. If following the law makes your project not work as well, that's your problem. It's on you to fix your project so that it's legal to use.
I'm not one of those old hams who gets hyper cranky about this stuff, but I do understand how they come to be that way. The only reason we can use the spectrum at all is that people are mostly using it legally so that their work isn't interfering with everyone else trying to use the same public resource.
Wifi HaLow 802.11ah is finally out & available, sometimes at ok prices. We don't really have ad-hoc communication pioneered for wifi, but it's doable and we ought lean into it, rather than using some totally different stack, especially one that is under strict control of a single company.
What we learn doing wifi halow can directly port and improve the rest of ways we connect. That would be grand.
Hostapd people also do not seem interested in bringing in any 802.11ah support. So it's crap in that aspect as well. Drivers all fake 802.11n or the chipset offers some garbage AT-command interface and does all of the networking.
On the other hand MeshCore and Meshtastic have similarly terrible codebases as far as I've seen. At least they're somewhat usable though.
Honestly no clue why these software stacks are all this dangerously written, unstable and haven't improved in years.
Marvell shipped some 802.11s in an already quite obsolete wifi driver for xopc a long time ago, but generally theres just very very very little availability of drivers. The friefunk and Batman and other wireless meshes had to fight fight fight, pick very very selectively what hardware to run on, and they are far less than the ad-hoc ambient connectivity we see.
I'd hoped wifi-nan (neighbor aware networking) was going to open things up a lot. And hostapd allegedly has some support now! But last I looked it's very unclear how to use it. And it's much more a low bandwidth back channel than an actual rendezvous system for making good wiif-direct or other faster connections, I believe.
There's been so little hardware that offers anything interesting. So that makes me feel like the concern here, that folks keep chasing higher level protocols that look shiny, isn't quite apt. There's such a broad unavailability of starting places, for l2 link layer options.
LoRa is another level. It works down to -146dBm.
802.11ah dies around -100dBm.
Still much much better than "standard" Wifi. But you are comparing two different beasts.
Highlighting the Claude usage in the headline is a blatant move to bait the anti-AI crowd and farm sympathy points. The real issue has nothing to do with who generated the AST -whether it was meat-ware or a transformer - the issue is the brand hijacking. Stop dragging technology into this; it’s just pure legal scumbaggery
In particular I did not like the shoddy documentation of the various vibe coded interfaces and how brittle the integration experience felt because of them.
Is this the new way? Attract a lot of developers, and when you think you can sell the product , you take all their code and call it your own.
Has this worked out for someone so far?