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Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

meshtastic.org

41–50 of 81 posts

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#41
post #17

Has anyone deployed and used a system like this here? If so, what was its purpose and why this technology over others?

Preppers use it as a backup communication channel. The scenarios are: 1. Your country is invaded, and you are building a resistance. 2. Your government becomes a dictatorship. You want to fight back. 3. Natural disasters: the grid and mobile network are down. You want to organize and work together to help each other. Meshtastic nicely blends into the existing IoT LoRa traffic. And give you some sort of invisibility.…

Or you are out in the mountains with spotty cell coverage and want to be able to send messages to other friends around you

Not everything prepper-like is for prepper-only usage

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#42
Related: https://github.com/antirez/freakwan/

Disclaimer: I'm the author. The concept is similar to Meshtastic, but the goal was to make more documented and clear choices at protocol level, to have a much simpler to hack and adapt implementation, and so forth.

If you happen to understand Italian, I gave a talk about it here: https://talks.codemotion.com/introduzione-alla-tecnologia-rf...

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#43
I wanted to be part of the “Decentralized Web” movement that TimBL spoke at but it died down.

I signed up to go to “offline camp” in Oregon (anyone else?) but it was canceled due to a large forest fire (probably related to Camp Fire) so I wound up camping near a river instead.

I’ve spent $1 million and over a decade to build open source community software that can run on any commodity servers — on a plane, on a cruise ship like Norwegian Cruise Lines, in rural villages, etc.

We want to help local education (including Afghan girls, but we are also in touch w the RohingyaProject.com and others to help stateless refugees).

Anyway, these mesh networks exist and our cellphone hardware is great, what’s missing is great backend software to wean people off Big Tech (Twitter, Facebook) the way the Web did for AOL, MSN, and the way Wordpress did for Web 1.0

If anyone wants to get involved, or knows a good “decentralized web” or “indieweb” movement that actually thrives, comment below and let me know how to get in touch.

https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

Recent article covering the platform:

https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#44
post #3

Before anyone gets too excited about this - half duplex/TDD-like mesh radio systems with omnidirectional antennas are one of the LEAST efficient possible ways of building a wireless village/town scale IP network. The thing about an omni antenna talking to another omni is that an omnidirectional antenna is also a 360 degree noise gatherer, and gathers traffic/timeslot occuyping stuff that might be coming from other, s…

LoRA , capital A for LLM training, LoRa for wireless

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#45
post #42

Related: https://github.com/antirez/freakwan/ Disclaimer: I'm the author. The concept is similar to Meshtastic, but the goal was to make more documented and clear choices at protocol level, to have a much simpler to hack and adapt implementation, and so forth. If you happen to understand Italian, I gave a talk about it here: https://talks.codemotion.com/introduzione-alla-tecnologia-rf...

https://www.robots-everywhere.com/cellsol/ magari si collabora?

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#47
post #12

Isn't there an open source Android mesh network? Based on Wifi or Bluetooth? I thought I heard about mesh networks being used in protests years ago...? Do we still not have something viable?

i remember something that was deployed in puerto rico after the hurricane in 2017.. a quick search later: https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/a-mesh-network-spontaneous...

... And it looks like the consumer products are all completely unavailable right now. Seems like they're focusing their efforts on rescue, emergency, and tactical products...

Dang it!

Re: Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network

#49
post #7

Is it feasible to create a mesh network using Bluetooth on participating smart phones? In crowded places like college campuses, we could run campus IM on it for instance

iOS limits what you can do in the background with Bluetooth. At least one of the iPhones needs to have your mesh app running in the foreground to communicate with another iPhone that has your app. Two locked phones with your mesh app will not be able to communicate over Bluetooth.
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