Clickbait title. Just say it's meshtastic.
Ok.......what's meshtastic? I still haven't clicked the article, and know nothing of which you speak.
I'd say this title is for people like me. I think it sounds cool.
It is cool! The barrier to entry is relatively low. The only thing to really worry about is:
If there's not a lot of people around it's not the end of the world. Nodes can connect over the Internet via MQTT servers. Yes, this defeats the purpose of having an offline/decentralized communication platform, but it is a good stop gap until more nodes are put up.
Here's a sample of what I can see in a somewhat large-ish Midwest City in the US (there's about 63 nodes I can reach by hopping through relays).
I got mine recently in a dxent aized city and while there are plenty of nodes popping up on the map, the local channel is pretty quiet. Is that normal?
Yep, that can be normal. For my city, the local group has a private (but free to join) channel that's a bit more active.
Do a web search for meshtastic and your city and see if one pops up.
It allows us to make a mesh network (interconnected nodes where you can contact a node even if it's not in range for you, by using other nodes) with Lora radio devices. Lora is slow but has long range. I think it works better when you have line of sight, like if someone can put a node on a mountain, it would help everyone.
I think people might have sent audio with it but it's mostly useful for text messages. It could be useful if the Internet is down, maybe, but it's more like a toy.
I mean it's an article for people like me who have never heard of that
Sure, but they could at least put that in the title as well so people who are familiar w/ it don't need to click through.
Definitely clickbait. The phrase "send texts" as it's been used for the past quarter century means "sms texts" or maybe "text messages to other people on mobile phone networks", which is not at all what this is.
Yeah this is not SMS! Its probably text that looks like:
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Nice article on Meshtastic. The problem is that, like anything, the actual distance is a lot more dependent on line of sight and the actual mesh existing. Which means we’d need a LOT more people to adopt these and put up repeaters for them to be useful. Which is doable, but not cheap.
Have a look at meshmap.net. That shows people who have voluntarily put themselves on a map.
Although it can be a serious underestimation, for example in my area, I'm the only one who lists myself on the map, but there are about 10 other nodes that don't
Edit: Also, the number of nodes on MeshMap has pretty much doubled in six months since I started playing with it.
I always thought these were more like walkie talkies for messaging than telephones that you can call anyone.
Like it would be good if cell serivce goes down.
That's pretty much exactly what they are. Text message in walkie-talkies. With the added benefit that if your friend can't hear you, but another friend is in between, your message automatically gets relayed through their walkie-talkie.
If I wanted to transmit, for example, temperature and humidity from a sensor once every 5 minutes, would the network be willing to carry my signals?
https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/device/
SENSOR is one of the defined device roles. And whether for personal automation or public information, it is a reasonable use case for the network.
Everything I learn about this project is so cool. I can’t go through the docs right now, but I’m assuming it can prioritize things like emergency communication over sensor data.
There’s no public nodes in a 200+ km radius around me on that site someone linked, so something tells me I’ll have to do a lot of guerilla solar panel installation if I want to anonymously set up something.
I’ve thought about it on and off over the past two years, more of a private network for family and friends than anything, for emergencies and so on. The real, big problem is that I could be accused of espionage and thrown into jail forever if I do this. So I don’t think I’ll see anyone putting any nodes up for the foreseeable future. At least not public nodes.
would the network be willing to carry my signals?
That is entirely up to the whim of your neighboring nodes to decide
Can you message random people or have to already know their contact info?
It is channel-based, using Pre-Shared Keys (PSK).
There is a public line where you can message pretty much everyone with the blank PSK.
Why not just add networking capabilities or a SIM card?
You can't expect me not to reinvent the wheel.
As we post on Lemmy, which is a reinvention of a reinvention of a reinvention of Usenet from 1979.
My wife and I each have a radio, as do several of my friends. They're handy for anything where you may not have cell coverage, like camping. We also use them at protests, to avoid the heavy surveillance that's being done on cell networks. Even if the authorities start looking at Meshtastic, everything except the public channel uses PGP end-to-end encryption, and there is no middleman that has access to the unencrypted data.
We have also put up a repeater node. It's on top of a house at the top of the highest ridge near us. Before it went up we rarely saw more than our own nodes. Now we see several dozen, and sometimes a lot more. And the repeater serves the whole community, not just us. The beauty of a mesh is that everyone contributes to everyone else's coverage.
The mesh in our city is growing rapidly right now. Not only are there a lot of people getting their own nodes, there are a surprising number of people putting up repeaters to help spread the coverage. It's amazing to watch our whole neighborhoods suddenly appear as gaps are filled in.
I maintain three of these devices, if anyone has any questions.
I got mine recently in a dxent aized city and while there are plenty of nodes popping up on the map, the local channel is pretty quiet. Is that normal?
Yeah, we had to make a weather app on longfast to fill the void. Tech people tend to not talk all that much. We are the strange ones ;)
Most of the weather app was made from a reddit post back a year or so ago. I have no idea where though. App is a python script here if your interested.
What kind of data rate can they provide? Can it support audio? Low bit-rate video?
I've seen LoRa when Pine64 announced some related products some years back, but I haven't really gotten into it. If the community is big enough and the bitrate reasonable enough, I might get one to connect my home to my parents home (about 10 miles away, so at the edge of the range) for fun. It would be cool to set up some smart home stuff at both ends that I could host on my own so I can keep an "eye" on my parents stuff when the travel (mostly just door and occupancy sensors, no video).
What is the typical power requirement on these devices? Can it be used to set up IoT sensor nodes in the wild where they work off solar, or do they need periodic tuning/care?
I'm running about 1w per device ATM.
So yeah it sips energy. There's a lot of nodes in the mountains that are solar powered. They work.
That's a great idea. The area I live in is pretty mountainous so putting nodes on ridges provide pretty good coverage
Very low and yes. They work great for IoT, as long as it’s not mission critical stuff as messages can get dropped or arrive out of order sometimes. But for something like monitoring a remote sensor station that’s within the Lora range, without needing a cellular plan, yes.
Man I've been seeing so much about these over the last few weeks, I'd love to get my hands on one
LoRa has been around for a while trying to break through with different devices, some of it does seem useful, but it's a tough sell to invest in something without knowing where the network will go. A carrier model or something else, maybe subsidies, is needed.
Not much bandwidth to know do much beyond text, so use-cases are probably very limited already.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
