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MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code

blog.meshcore.io

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Re: MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code

#181

Post by komali2 »

RobotToaster wrote: post #125
atomicthumbs wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is it because amateur radio operators legally have standards they have to comply with?

Kinda, most hams are very rhadamanthine about following every tiny rule to the letter, or their even stricter interpretation of the spirit. The type of people who complain about young people not joining the hobby while insisting on maintaining strict licensing rules and tests. It's very much the polar opposite of hacker ethic.

I've got friends in the scene and their behavior about it reminds me of other types of friends I have

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...

Re: MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code

#182

Post by komali2 »

brk wrote: post #14

I've played with MeshCore and Meshtastic a bit, and while they are fun, the general hype seems overblown. The "SHTF" types that get involved with this tend to just taint the whole concept for me. I was/am interested in the use cases for building sensor networks, but most of the chatter seems to be around people who just want to send Hello World type texts back and forth, without realizing how poorly a network like th…

> SHTF

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...

Re: MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code

#183

Post by firesteelrain »

komali2 wrote: post #180
bb88 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ended up getting a ham radio license and now I get to use technology that actually works (even if it's a little more janky than meshtastic/reticulum). 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.

I vaguely remember reading an article where someone had somehow transmitted digital signals over HAM, could feasibly be a transport for a reticulum network, right?

Digital is heavily used in ham radio. For example, FT8.

Re: MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code

#184

Post by neltnerb »

cuu508 wrote: post #177
jeromegv wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore The vibecoder was on MeshOS, which indeed is not open source

That's the board firmware, not the official Meshcore Android or IOS app.

I admit it was a super meta-funny response, because everyone I see that's into meshcore thinks it's open source because of that repository and posts it after a 30 second google search when questioned.

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.

Re: MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code

#185

Post by bb88 »

DrewADesign wrote: post #99
bb88 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ended up getting a ham radio license and now I get to use technology that actually works (even if it's a little more janky than meshtastic/reticulum). 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.

For hobby usage, ham is fantastic. For decentralized communication for the general public, which seems to be Meshcore/Meshtastic’s goal, it’s a nonstarter. There’s just too big a barrier to entry.

And unfortunately Meshtastic fails miserably at that. Meshcore is better, but maybe not anymore. I'm not even sure Lora is the best technology for this either since you'd really want something that can listen to more than 1 channel at a time.

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.

Re: MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code

#186

Post by DrewADesign »

bb88 wrote: post #185
DrewADesign wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For hobby usage, ham is fantastic. For decentralized communication for the general public, which seems to be Meshcore/Meshtastic’s goal, it’s a nonstarter. There’s just too big a barrier to entry.

And unfortunately Meshtastic fails miserably at that. Meshcore is better, but maybe not anymore. I'm not even sure Lora is the best technology for this either since you'd really want something that can listen to more than 1 channel at a time. 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 wor…

> Meshcore is better, but maybe not anymore.

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.

Re: MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code

#187

Post by bb88 »

DrewADesign wrote: post #186
bb88 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And unfortunately Meshtastic fails miserably at that. Meshcore is better, but maybe not anymore. I'm not even sure Lora is the best technology for this either since you'd really want something that can listen to more than 1 channel at a time. 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 wor…

> Meshcore is better, but maybe not anymore. 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.

Because of the split. But your right, meshtastic does have dumb routing. And I haven't used meshcore, but I probably won't now until the dust settles on this for a while.

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].

[0] http://kiwisdr.com/public/

[1] http://21959.proxy2.kiwisdr.com:8073/

Re: MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code

#188

Post by jauntywundrkind »

KurSix wrote: post #114
Avamander wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 802.11ah offerings right now are a mess though. Mostly proprietary and just generally very buggy. I don't know of a single chip that can actually be used with up-to-date Linux. Do you? Be it Morse Micro, Newracom, Taixin or any other, they all suck in some aspect. 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 ch…

Mesh networking is still mostly a playground for hobbyists and hacky, built-on-the-knee implementations. People love shipping a cool PoC, but as soon as the boring stuff starts - stabilization, drivers, edge cases - everyone bails to chase the next hype protocol. We’re left with mountains of half-baked C++ legacy that nobody dares to refactor because the whole house of cards would collapse iirc

I see it much more as a chicken & egg problem. There's few places to even start to engage because so little hardware supports interesting modes well, particularly when coexisting with our normal operating modes.

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.

Re: MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code

#189

Post by jimnotgym »

toyg wrote: post #66
jimnotgym wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an amateur radio licence and I agree. One reason I rarely operate... I always found it interesting how many useful little apps hams write, keep them closed source and then...die.

Could it be because of the history of radio and early electronics being full of inventors getting ripped off by unscrupulous parties...?

Yes, and they extended that myth to the incredibly niche software they built that has a commercial value of...nil

Re: MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code

#190

Post by x2tyfi »

405nm wrote: post #164
jubilanti wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are tons 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…

that map on rmap.world is only showing nodes that run dicoverable=yes in their configurations or something like that. 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.

It seems odd that such a tiny proportion would run `discoverable=yes`. Any idea why that is? It makes me question the numbers.
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