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.
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.
I bought a pile of LoRa/Meshtastic stuff and tried to research it and figure out if I could easily use something like APRS to log my location and plot it on a map.
Seemed much harder than the process of setting up an APRS iGate and viewing my location on aprs.fi
I'd like to try again sometime though, but feel like I need a good getting started guide to motivate me!
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.
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, slightly further away, mesh nodes it can hear that your radio is not immediately engaged in tx/rx with...
Similarly, for everything that you transmit packets towards another specific node, 99% of your RF signal is going in azimuth directions that you don't want and don't need, but because it's an omni it goes everywhere. Raising the noise floor for all other nearby nodes of similar hardware configuration.
I would encourage people who want to do something like this on a very tight budget to look into the designed for purpose point-to-point (primarily parabolic reflector based) 802.11ac/ax based radio systems that exist to form L2 ethernet bridges between two locations. And some newer very low cost 24 GHz and 60 GHz based stuff also designed for exclusively line-of-sight (and line-of-fresnel-zone-clearance) point-to-point bridges.
LoRA stuff is also much better if have fixed-link needs between two spots in bands far below the typical 2.4 or 5.x GHz, working in VHF/UHF-like bands (or generally anywhere below 1300 MHz), and can point a few yagi-uda or dipole type antennas at each other instead of having two omnidirectional antennas talk to each other.
If you have sites which are not mobile and do not move around or change location relative to each other, and you want better link reliability and data rates, I would strongly encourage people to look into using just about anything else that isn't an omni to form network links between nodes.
randomly chosen example in 5 seconds of googling, note gain pattern in one specific direction:
One of the cool things being done with LoRA-type chipsets and RF modules these days is ExpressLRS, which implements a serial UART bridge between remote controller and UAV (or unmanned boat, ground vehicle, etc) for link between human and onboard flight controller. Evolution of the same general idea as TBS Crossfire for RC applications.
This is why stuff like smart antennas and beamforming were invented. But for a system like LoRA that has a very low thoughput (AKA slow in the time domain), it's not an easy concept to apply in mobility.
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.
The internet is already the global mesh network. It turns out one individual contributes nothing, compared to a 1000km 10000Gbps fiber link that costs millions of dollars to lay. But nobody is actually stopping you from getting ports at two DCs or IXes, somehow getting them connected to each other, then charging people to carry traffic between them. I got a price quote for about $800/month to carry 10Gbps 650km in Europe, so that's what you could potentially earn.
If you're interested in large meshes, check out wirepas, though it's based on 802.15.4 rather than LoRa.
I was a Product Manager for a mesh based personnel tracking system on construction sites. We licensed Wirepas's tech for our solution... wound up learning a lot about the nuances of meshes.
yggdrasil can use WiFi on Android, I haven't tried it yet - https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/. yggdrasil gives you the ability to use TCP/IP applications over its mesh network but doesn't offer any end-user functionality itself.
Manyverse can use WiFi for decentralised social networking - https://www.manyver.se/. They're currently in the middle of a rewrite of the backend and a protocol switch away from Secure Scuttlebutt to their own protocol currently named PPPPP.
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.
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 a max hop limit, to prevent messages from bouncing around the network repeatably, but also not guaranteeing messages reach their destination. Meshtastic defaults to 3. Gotenna I believe is also Lora and is also 3. Bridgefy is bluetooth and has a 250 max hop limit, but also a 7d TTL, basically not close to real-time.
It could be made better by having statically position nodes that keep track of the nodes it can reach. And then having all these statically positioned nodes communicate with each other on a different wireless spectrum so you don't interfere with regular nodes. Since that topology isn't changing, you can efficiently route message between them. Now that's basically just regular wifi mesh.
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.
Yes it is possible. The P2P Matrix demos worked in this way but they were alpha-quality at best, shoehorning today’s federation protocol on top of Pinecone mesh routing over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi. It still needed a lot of work to adapt the Matrix federation protocol to be properly usable in real-time without full-mesh connectivity.
I just played with it a little bit and my first impression was that the Meshtastic app is exceptionally well made. I only tried iOS, so I can only speak for that, but I was pleasantly surprised.
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.
Other scenarios are similar to ham radio - asking other dudes about the weather.
I just bought two LilyGo TTGO T-Echo devices. My plan is to experiment with them on snowmobiles. The ability to be slightly separated (a few km) but still send location and brief messages will be handy deep in the woods where cell coverage is very spotty.
Yes. We use it to have a backup communication channel when all other networks are down. This is an extremely unlikely scenario. If that happens wireless communication is going to be the least of the problems.
[+] [-] antirez|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] spiritplumber|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Karrot_Kream|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pr8dan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leashless|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danesparza|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exadeci|2 years ago|reply
I also made a fork of a modified firmware that gives you your playa location
https://github.com/exadeci/Meshtastic-device-bm
[+] [-] reissbaker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3abiton|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] new299|2 years ago|reply
Seemed much harder than the process of setting up an APRS iGate and viewing my location on aprs.fi
I'd like to try again sometime though, but feel like I need a good getting started guide to motivate me!
[+] [-] anakaine|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moffkalast|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ac29|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goodpoint|2 years ago|reply
Wee bit sexist...
EDIT: Yes I know it's a proverb, I'm not blaming the parent post.
EDIT: 4 downvotes? Nice.
[+] [-] walrus01|2 years ago|reply
Similarly, for everything that you transmit packets towards another specific node, 99% of your RF signal is going in azimuth directions that you don't want and don't need, but because it's an omni it goes everywhere. Raising the noise floor for all other nearby nodes of similar hardware configuration.
I would encourage people who want to do something like this on a very tight budget to look into the designed for purpose point-to-point (primarily parabolic reflector based) 802.11ac/ax based radio systems that exist to form L2 ethernet bridges between two locations. And some newer very low cost 24 GHz and 60 GHz based stuff also designed for exclusively line-of-sight (and line-of-fresnel-zone-clearance) point-to-point bridges.
LoRA stuff is also much better if have fixed-link needs between two spots in bands far below the typical 2.4 or 5.x GHz, working in VHF/UHF-like bands (or generally anywhere below 1300 MHz), and can point a few yagi-uda or dipole type antennas at each other instead of having two omnidirectional antennas talk to each other.
If you have sites which are not mobile and do not move around or change location relative to each other, and you want better link reliability and data rates, I would strongly encourage people to look into using just about anything else that isn't an omni to form network links between nodes.
randomly chosen example in 5 seconds of googling, note gain pattern in one specific direction:
https://www.elprocus.com/design-of-yagi-uda-antenna/
One of the cool things being done with LoRA-type chipsets and RF modules these days is ExpressLRS, which implements a serial UART bridge between remote controller and UAV (or unmanned boat, ground vehicle, etc) for link between human and onboard flight controller. Evolution of the same general idea as TBS Crossfire for RC applications.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=expresslr...
[+] [-] KennyBlanken|2 years ago|reply
It's text messaging with channels, some provisions for nodes transmitting sensor data, and some location data.
It's not intended to provide TCP/IP networking.
[+] [-] datadeft|2 years ago|reply
> building a wireless village/town scale IP network
This was never its goal. You can build a simple messaging network for text that has a pretty good range and low bandwidth. That is all.
[+] [-] kaliqt|2 years ago|reply
There's so much possibility to bypass ISPs...
[+] [-] niles|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lormayna|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AleaImeta|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsmv|2 years ago|reply
I want a global mesh network to replace the internet
[+] [-] __MatrixMan__|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] immibis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c_o_n_v_e_x|2 years ago|reply
I was a Product Manager for a mesh based personnel tracking system on construction sites. We licensed Wirepas's tech for our solution... wound up learning a lot about the nuances of meshes.
[+] [-] xpe|2 years ago|reply
What are your design criteria you have in mind? There are tough tradeoffs around discoverability, latency, availability, security.
[+] [-] VikingCoder|2 years ago|reply
I thought I heard about mesh networks being used in protests years ago...?
Do we still not have something viable?
[+] [-] linuxandrew|2 years ago|reply
Manyverse can use WiFi for decentralised social networking - https://www.manyver.se/. They're currently in the middle of a rewrite of the backend and a protocol switch away from Secure Scuttlebutt to their own protocol currently named PPPPP.
Reticulum/Sideband offers a P2P messaging system over WiFi or other mediums - https://github.com/markqvist/sideband
[+] [-] kaliqt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woleium|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|2 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] spiritplumber|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suck-my-spez|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamer7|2 years ago|reply
In crowded places like college campuses, we could run campus IM on it for instance
[+] [-] ThatPlayer|2 years ago|reply
All these mesh networks have a max hop limit, to prevent messages from bouncing around the network repeatably, but also not guaranteeing messages reach their destination. Meshtastic defaults to 3. Gotenna I believe is also Lora and is also 3. Bridgefy is bluetooth and has a 250 max hop limit, but also a 7d TTL, basically not close to real-time.
It could be made better by having statically position nodes that keep track of the nodes it can reach. And then having all these statically positioned nodes communicate with each other on a different wireless spectrum so you don't interfere with regular nodes. Since that topology isn't changing, you can efficiently route message between them. Now that's basically just regular wifi mesh.
[0] https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/mesh-algo
[+] [-] mapmap|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilalexander|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geraldhh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] getwiththeprog|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rj45jackattack|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eql5|2 years ago|reply
http://cl-repl.org/meshtastic.htm
[+] [-] weinzierl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hugsun|2 years ago|reply
If so, what was its purpose and why this technology over others?
[+] [-] bilinguliar|2 years ago|reply
The scenarios are:
Meshtastic nicely blends into the existing IoT LoRa traffic. And give you some sort of invisibility.Other scenarios are similar to ham radio - asking other dudes about the weather.
[+] [-] bronco21016|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] datadeft|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KingLancelot|2 years ago|reply
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