Related: <a href="https://github.com/antirez/freakwan/">https://github.com/antirez/freakwan/</a><p>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.<p>If you happen to understand Italian, I gave a talk about it here: <a href="https://talks.codemotion.com/introduzione-alla-tecnologia-rf-lora-come-comunicare-a-grandi-distanza-con-potenze-irrisorie?_ga=2.58868014.2041057483.1704118978-1763450036.1704118978" rel="nofollow">https://talks.codemotion.com/introduzione-alla-tecnologia-rf...</a>
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.<p>Seemed much harder than the process of setting up an APRS iGate and viewing my location on aprs.fi<p>I'd like to try again sometime though, but feel like I need a good getting started guide to motivate me!
Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, and a LoRA transceiver what its throughput rate is.<p>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.
Before anyone gets too excited about this - half duplex/TDD-like mesh radio systems with <i>omnidirectional</i> 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 <i>not</i> immediately engaged in tx/rx with...<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>just about anything else that isn't an omni</i> to form network links between nodes.<p>randomly chosen example in 5 seconds of googling, note gain pattern in one specific direction:<p><a href="https://www.elprocus.com/design-of-yagi-uda-antenna/" rel="nofollow">https://www.elprocus.com/design-of-yagi-uda-antenna/</a><p>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.<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=expresslrs+lora" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=expresslr...</a>
Some real-life experience using the Android app, showing e.g. traceroute functionality from a very enthusiastic Brit: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmGr1pGJ4sM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmGr1pGJ4sM</a>
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.<p>I want a global mesh network to replace the internet
Isn't there an open source Android mesh network? Based on Wifi or Bluetooth?<p>I thought I heard about mesh networks being used in protests years ago...?<p>Do we still not have something viable?
I wanted to be part of the “Decentralized Web” movement that TimBL spoke at but it died down.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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<p>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.<p><a href="https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/" rel="nofollow">https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/</a><p>Recent article covering the platform:<p><a href="https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/" rel="nofollow">https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/</a>
<a href="https://www.robots-everywhere.com/cellsol/" rel="nofollow">https://www.robots-everywhere.com/cellsol/</a> We made this in 2020ish and it respects meshtastic and disasterradio packets.
Used to use this but it’s long gone. <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat</a>
Is it feasible to create a mesh network using Bluetooth on participating smart phones?<p>In crowded places like college campuses, we could run campus IM on it for instance
See previous discussions <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=meshtastic.org">https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=meshtastic.org</a>
During summer I played around with this technology and built a simple messaging app (written in Common Lisp), see:<p><a href="http://cl-repl.org/meshtastic.htm" rel="nofollow">http://cl-repl.org/meshtastic.htm</a>
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.