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Ideally these would be mesh networking and cheap enough to place in several spots on a ranch or farm. This way you could place half a dozen and get full coverag

Ideally these would be mesh networking and cheap enough to place in several spots on a ranch or farm. This way you could place half a dozen and get full coverage easily. Alas, I've read too many of the IoT radios of late and am not sure if the beep kits are mesh enabled.

PaulHoule 10y ago
I am highly skeptical of mesh networks. Maintaining one radio is one thing, maintaining ten of them is another. Each one has a battery to worry about as well, can go bad, can be misconfigured, etc. Whereas if I have one radio on the roof my house or barn there is less to go wrong. There is also no promise adding more nodes to a mesh network will improve performance since the nodes can interfere with each other. There is a huge literature on mesh networks because the area gets huge amount of military funding, and maybe the military really can use them, but I think they are a solution looking for a problem in an environment where people act as if wires were ritually unclean.
- woah 10y ago
  Your skepticism around deploying lots of hardware vs one central transmitter is valid. But I'm kind of confused by your comment about wires. It sounds like you're implying that a wired network will somehow make the equipment attached to it more reliable.
  - elcritch 10y ago
    @whoa generally wired networks have been preferred in most industrial-scale sensor networks to ensure reliable connectivity. Until very recently I wouldn't have even considered doing an active control network over a wireless network. But recent IoT hardware and mesh networks have gotten surprisingly good! @PaulHoule those are some good points. I would've agreed up until recently, but the newer IoT mesh radios have gotten surprisingly robust. The frequency modulators and collision detection baked into the last few iterations of lower cost IoT chips (like DigiMesh/Nordic chips) really have improved. We've been using DigiMesh 900 MHz units in a greenhouse setting with great success (especially compared to 2.4GHz which drops packets with abandon), with no measured packet loss to date. Pretty sweet! To wrap that up, low-throughput but hi-scalability mesh networks combined with better firmware, network configuration, tuned mesh protocols, and proper software support to make the "throw a few of these down and forget them" scenario a real possibility. Check out the Beep networks blog for a longer explanation: http://blog.beepnetworks.com/2016/09/messy-networks-for-the-internet-of-things/ http://blog.beepnetworks.com/2016/09/messy-networks-for-the-...

PaulHoule 10y ago

I am highly skeptical of mesh networks. Maintaining one radio is one thing, maintaining ten of them is another. Each one has a battery to worry about as well, can go bad, can be misconfigured, etc. Whereas if I have one radio on the roof my house or barn there is less to go wrong. There is also no promise adding more nodes to a mesh network will improve performance since the nodes can interfere with each other. There is a huge literature on mesh networks because the area gets huge amount of military funding, and maybe the military really can use them, but I think they are a solution looking for a problem in an environment where people act as if wires were ritually unclean.

woah 10y ago
Your skepticism around deploying lots of hardware vs one central transmitter is valid. But I'm kind of confused by your comment about wires. It sounds like you're implying that a wired network will somehow make the equipment attached to it more reliable.
- elcritch 10y ago
  @whoa generally wired networks have been preferred in most industrial-scale sensor networks to ensure reliable connectivity. Until very recently I wouldn't have even considered doing an active control network over a wireless network. But recent IoT hardware and mesh networks have gotten surprisingly good! @PaulHoule those are some good points. I would've agreed up until recently, but the newer IoT mesh radios have gotten surprisingly robust. The frequency modulators and collision detection baked into the last few iterations of lower cost IoT chips (like DigiMesh/Nordic chips) really have improved. We've been using DigiMesh 900 MHz units in a greenhouse setting with great success (especially compared to 2.4GHz which drops packets with abandon), with no measured packet loss to date. Pretty sweet! To wrap that up, low-throughput but hi-scalability mesh networks combined with better firmware, network configuration, tuned mesh protocols, and proper software support to make the "throw a few of these down and forget them" scenario a real possibility. Check out the Beep networks blog for a longer explanation: http://blog.beepnetworks.com/2016/09/messy-networks-for-the-internet-of-things/ http://blog.beepnetworks.com/2016/09/messy-networks-for-the-...