51–60 of 192 posts
Light up MQTT-explorer and explore the default topics for a good laugh
I had never heard of this before, then last week I watched a video about it and was hooked. Now I'm seeing it everywhere! Meshtastic and Meshcore are both cool LoRa-based mesh text messaging that operate in an no-license-required band. While this limits your transmit power, it doesn't prohibit encryption - the inverse of most ham radio rules! Some cities have thriving communities of Meshtastic and/or Meshcore. You ca…
So you have the mesh and then what? Do people communicate to distribute prohibited anti-government propaganda or is it a network of people who otherwise be too shy to talk to each other by other means? What is the use case?
People are very enamored with what you could theoretically do with it, but they never actually do any of it. It's a hardware fetish, it's all about building boxes with solar panels and seeing how many nodes you can light up on the map. Reminds me of another ham radio thing I never got into, "contesting".
I find it weird that the hop limit is 3 bits, wouldn't that limit the effective range a lot? Unless an intermediate node lies and doesn't decrement and retransmits anyway.
It's flood routed. 3 bits is probably far past what is practical, except in very linear low-node-count networks.
Perhaps a per node hash of known recent routes to avoid flooding every single time and using flooding as a backup.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would try to select based on the merits of the project and its adoption instead of drama. For me the team behind meshtastic needs some help behind their approach to APIs, the app releases frequently break that contract and they probably just need a little help in that area to improve it. Meshcore sounds compelling to me because it has that fixed vs dynamic target approach which I suspect is more true to the real wo…
the merits of one are largely vibe-coded by one overly enthusiastic guy.
I had never heard of this before, then last week I watched a video about it and was hooked. Now I'm seeing it everywhere! Meshtastic and Meshcore are both cool LoRa-based mesh text messaging that operate in an no-license-required band. While this limits your transmit power, it doesn't prohibit encryption - the inverse of most ham radio rules! Some cities have thriving communities of Meshtastic and/or Meshcore. You ca…
So you have the mesh and then what? Do people communicate to distribute prohibited anti-government propaganda or is it a network of people who otherwise be too shy to talk to each other by other means? What is the use case?
95% of it is people just doing ping? Pong! In chat.
The cheapest devices are like $10. Order one and have a go.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is russia densely populated enough to be able to make it work? Around me I'm having trouble getting a connection to any other nodes because there isn't a critical mass of other people running mesh nodes and there's a hill between me and the next city
https://meshmap.net https://www.meshcoretel.ru/en/MOW/map Maybe other maps too... I thing Russia's main problem (not only with mesh) is that you have millions of people living in or near few cities and very few inbetween. And those living "inbetween" typically have no money or time for things like mesh, they are struggling with simplier things.
It's just a personal opinion, but I really think this is not the case in reality.
Those guys in the middle of nowhere are the biggest geeks in LoRa networks. They have more practical scenarios, more to gain and better conditions for great distances.
A friend of mine lives far away from me, barely populated area, a big city in between of us. He struggled to get any network traffic, but now he uses narrow antennas to point to particular repeaters and suddenly the whole metropolis is open to him. We talk with acceptable delivery rates (I'm guessing 70%, which is actually very decent in dense area like mine). He is currently trying to expand his local network. His neighbors are less technical, but they have frequent power failures and need alternative way to reach each other.
On the other hand there is A LOT of client nodes and repeaters in my city. Many struggle to reach even a single repeater - hard to access roofs, high buildings, crowded network with plenty of conflicts. This kills motivation for many.
I recently received my ham (Technician) license. This was mostly a result of the state of conflict between various nations, but something I've long perceived as vital for community and individual resilience and stability in difficult times. Many are using GMRS, as it provides easy access to the entire family for $10 over ten years and requires no test. But as does most UHF/VHF or line-of-sight comms, it relies heavil…
Re: markdown and hugo, that's an excellent combo. You could easily setup a raspberry pi or $5/mo vps to serve it behind caddy/traefik/nginx and have a working multipage app (mpa) in a weekend.
Or a few minutes with AI haha
I had never heard of this before, then last week I watched a video about it and was hooked. Now I'm seeing it everywhere! Meshtastic and Meshcore are both cool LoRa-based mesh text messaging that operate in an no-license-required band. While this limits your transmit power, it doesn't prohibit encryption - the inverse of most ham radio rules! Some cities have thriving communities of Meshtastic and/or Meshcore. You ca…
So you have the mesh and then what? Do people communicate to distribute prohibited anti-government propaganda or is it a network of people who otherwise be too shy to talk to each other by other means? What is the use case?
Of course if it ever becomes popular, that will quickly change. But for now it is like early IRC.
I had never heard of this before, then last week I watched a video about it and was hooked. Now I'm seeing it everywhere! Meshtastic and Meshcore are both cool LoRa-based mesh text messaging that operate in an no-license-required band. While this limits your transmit power, it doesn't prohibit encryption - the inverse of most ham radio rules! Some cities have thriving communities of Meshtastic and/or Meshcore. You ca…
So you have the mesh and then what? Do people communicate to distribute prohibited anti-government propaganda or is it a network of people who otherwise be too shy to talk to each other by other means? What is the use case?
The entire thing would fall over in any kind of scenario where you needed to rely on this janky mesh network as a primary means of communications.
It can be fun/useful for very out of the way things where you have a handful of people out camping, or other off-grid situations. But frankly even in those cases there are far better/established ways to keep in sync if you need to (eg: FRS).
This stuff is mostly a solution looking for a problem.