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

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

#51

Post by Karrot_Kream »

antirez wrote: 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...

Oh very cool! Do you have any stats on distance and other things you can achieve? I can't believe you have a Mesh WAN project!!

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

#52

Post by eql5 »

danesparza wrote: post #38
leashless wrote: post #18

We used it at Burning Man in 2023. Burning Man is hard on gear and a surprisingly busy RF environment. It was reliable and has a good user experience. I really liked it.

My understanding is that LoRA isn't high bandwidth -- so just out of curiosity, what kinds of things did you use this for?

The official meshtastic app can only transmit text messages (max ~230 characters) plus location data (GPS). Optionally it can also transmit sensor data (see RAK WisBlock devices, where you can add sensors for temperature, humidity, air quality).

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

#53

Post by ZyanWu »

goodpoint wrote: post #27
moffkalast wrote: post #24

Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, and a LoRA transceiver what its throughput rate is. At double digit bits per second, it has to be like a few characters per second at best or even less with packet headers, error correction, etc.

> Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary Wee bit sexist... EDIT: Yes I know it's a proverb, I'm not blaming the parent post. EDIT: 4 downvotes? Nice.

You're taking things out of context and commenting on the newly created problem. HN's not the right place for this

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

#56

Post by xpe »

fsmv wrote: post #54

It says it only scales to 80 nodes, so sounds like you won't find a mesh to join unless you make it yourself and it can only be people you know. I want a global mesh network to replace the internet

> I want a global mesh network to replace the internet

What are your design criteria you have in mind? There are tough tradeoffs around discoverability, latency, availability, security.

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

#57

Post by ac29 »

moffkalast wrote: post #24

Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, and a LoRA transceiver what its throughput rate is. At double digit bits per second, it has to be like a few characters per second at best or even less with packet headers, error correction, etc.

Reading the datasheet for one of the most common radios used for meshtastic devices (Semtech SX1262) the lowest bitrate is pretty slow: 18bps. But, with larger channel sizes and lower spreading factors, it goes up to 62.5kbps. I cant tell exactly which mode meshtastic uses by default, but it looks like there are 8 presets.

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

#58

Post by antirez »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #51
antirez wrote: 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...

Oh very cool! Do you have any stats on distance and other things you can achieve? I can't believe you have a Mesh WAN project!!

Hey! With the maximum spreading, and the stock (very poor) omni antennas in the Lilygo devices, you get this:

~ 500 - 1km: urban landscape, tons of buildings in the middle. Like opposite sides of a very crowded block.

~ 5 km: open landscape, some small hills in the middle, no good optical contact.

~ 50 / 80 km: direct optical contact, especially if CRC is disabled.

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

#59

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

fsmv wrote: post #54

It says it only scales to 80 nodes, so sounds like you won't find a mesh to join unless you make it yourself and it can only be people you know. I want a global mesh network to replace the internet

Me too. I think the way forward--at least for now--is not large meshes, but partition tolerant apps.

A search for "Is Taco Express open right now?" should not resolve a globally unique name to a globally unique address and then ask some distant server which will then ask for your location info so that it can figure out which taco express you mean. That's so fragile.

Instead the search should propagate through whichever meshes happen to be in range until it encounters a node which is authoritative on Taco Express hours (which is probably a raspberry pi at the Taco Express). You get local results because they're local to the query.

The problem of bridging these meshes is interesting, but it's just not that useful until we have an app ecosystem that doesn't rely on stable addresses for individual nodes.

We need context addressing and pub/sub, not server addressing and request/response. It's going to require a pretty big conceptual shift. Sadly, I don't see that shift happening until some disaster convinces us that it's necessary.

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

#60

Post by ThatPlayer »

neilalexander wrote: post #30
ThatPlayer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think any wireless mesh like this runs into issues with scaling because you cannot efficiently route messages between a bunch of moving nodes as the network topology is always changing. You have to use a flood network, which is also what Meshtastic does [0]. Flood networking wastes bandwidth with every node repeating itself, and it gets even worse with wireless that's a shared spectrum. All these mesh networks have…

There are more state-of-the-art routing protocols working to solve this problem for mesh networks. A couple examples of projects I have been involved in: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://github.com/matrix-org/pinecone

I don't know if I consider those the same thing as they're not fully wireless meshes. They'll use the internet when possible, so it wouldn't be an off-grid network. And without internet, it won't scale.

So if you're using internet anyways, at high-density locations like a college campus, just deploy more wireless APs in the area instead of building an inefficient wireless mesh network. The wireless mesh part of those protocols is only useful for areas with no internet, but somehow enough people to build a chain to an internet connected device.

Reading Pinecone's documentation: "The only requirements for a peering today are that it is stream-oriented and reliable" [0]. I don't think a phone that's constantly moving around and battery operated (so you want to power-save by transmitting less) is considered reliable.

Pinecone's offline protocol also will not route to devices that haven't been seen in the last 10 seconds [1]. Basically preventing phones from sleeping or going into a low power state. That's also the kind of protocol that only works for small wireless mesh networks. A huge wireless mesh network would quickly be filled with "I'm here" broadcasts if a device is expected to do it every 10 seconds and it has to be repeated for everyone else on the mesh.

[0] https://matrix-org.github.io/pinecone/introduction

[1] https://matrix-org.github.io/pinecone/virtual_snake/maintena...

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