Hi what is Meshtastic
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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Meshtastic® is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source!
How does this differ from walkie talkies?
It is text-based only. And since it's such a small amount of data, it can be transmitted a much longer distance.
There's also the Mesh part where if two nodes (radios) are too far apart, and another node is in between, it can act as an intermediary/relay to increase distance. You can use ~4 nodes (3 hops) in this way.
Communications are also encrypted.
Is 4 nodes the maximum able to connect?
Not sure what you mean by "connect". You can connect hundreds of them in a mesh network (although the network will eventually become saturated if you don't adjust), but message delivery is typically electronically limited to 3 "hops" for any particular message.
Oh this is making some sense to me now. Will this replace or augment iMessage one day?
Hehe no. It is text/emoji only. Best used in places where cell networks don't exist, go down, or become saturated, or some combination.
Oh. Not even 20 years in the future? Never would have expected the fediverse or iPhones that can talk to satellites.
It could certainly easily be added as another backup communication method built into phones, yes. But among many other reasons, Apple doesn't touch anything "open", so if anything they would implement their own LoRa protocol.
But it will never replace photos/videos/files or other functionality that iMessage supports, it's a limitation of the technology.
By supporting networking (and also using a mesh to increase range).
As I understand "walkie talkie" radios, the spectrum they use (GMRS/FRS/CB/MURS, etc) isn't permitted to transmit data in a way that's useful for proper data networking (there's some allowance for data but not really anything like what most people think of as networking, and encryption is right out of the question).
For the most part, these radio specs can only increase range by use of repeaters. IIRC meshtastic takes a mesh approach to increasing range and reliability.
They can transmit any kind of data and be hooked to the internet if you like.
The long range part I guess.
As someone that's used a pile of Heltec Lora V3: they're fragile pieces of overpriced shit. I've kept buying them as they've kept failing and I think I've purchased about a dozen in order to keep 2 devices alive, and the latest two are only a few weeks old. I've had a brand new one just stop working as I've programmed it for the first time, and I handle these things with an ESD strap on because I think they're just really poorly protected.
I'm porting my project (a solar pump with radio linked trough float) to eByte e32s and a standard ESP32 because I'm tired of having these things crater if I look at them sideways.
Been wanting to play with a meshtastic radio and the TC2-BBS stuff, but the official site was uh, not the most clear as to what the hell I actually wanted/needed.
This certainly clarifies that, at least, so thanks!
Never even heard of these before today. This seems so interesting and would be really nice if you live in a really rural area.