15 ms·

We're making an open-source $30 GPS/mesh radio, would like advice

620 points by punkgeek 7y ago

punkgeek 7y ago
Hi ya'll, so we've spent a few weeks making device software and an android app to convert a $30 chinese gps/radio into a long range mesh radio for hikers. It is working fairly well now (though still an alpha) and we'd love more people to try it and/or have fun coding on it. We got about 30 users (and some devs from this hackaday article) but we'd love more users and devs to join this happy-happy project: https://hackaday.com/2020/02/26/lora-mesh-network-with-off-the-shelf-hardware/ https://hackaday.com/2020/02/26/lora-mesh-network-with-off-t... I'm happy to respond to any questions or comments...
- hobs 7y ago
  That's awesome, this kind of thing was the first idea I had when I saw the LoRa radios, but was far too lazy to start doing :p still have the hardware at home; ill see if I can install it later.
  - punkgeek 7y ago
    awesome! we'd love to have you join us ;-)
- jkoberg 7y ago
  What frequency band are you using? ISM is the only one that permits store-and-forward / automatic operation, as the gotenna people found. You say a few miles per node - I am having trouble seeing how that's possible without elevating all the nodes
  - superkuh 7y ago
    He's gotta be assuming the nodes have clear line of sight and fresnel zone. The maximum distance for the link budget in a perfect situation. In practice it probably cuts off at the nearest rise in the ground or depression. But they're still cool and I still want some for non-hiking applications. With the very low power idle and low cost they could be set up with solar panels in the tops of trees or in similar high height above terrain positions.
    - generatorguy 7y ago
      915 MHz goes a lot farther than 2.4 GHz. At very low bit rates you need very little SNR. There is probably very low noise out in hiking environments. Yes, attenuation due to terrain is going to be a killer, but my experience with non line of sight 900 MHz links blasting through trees leads me to believe it would be workable for low bit rate data between a series of hikers along the same trail. It is sending only location and text messages so intermittent link status or re-tries due to temporarily terrain/foliage obstructions will not cause degradation in service that you would experience trying to watch netflix over this mesh.
      - superkuh 7y ago
        You're wrong. It's a mistake to treat terrain and foliage as the same thing. I have extensive experience with 3 completely different, narrowband and wideband, 902-928 MHz radio data systems as well as just playing around in the range with my software defined radios (hackrf, rtlsdr, etc). 902-928 has almost no advantage over 2.4 GHz when it comes to line of sight issues with terrain. In fact, it's more problematic due to the increased size of the fresnel zone. Sure, it does better through trees but a slight rise of ground is just as much of a problem for 915 and 2400. The freq here isn't helping much. It's the chirp and LORA modulation helping the link budget. But no line of sight is no line of sight.
        generatorguy 7y ago
        It sounds like you agree 900 MHz will be much better than 2.4 GHz in this non line of sight application so long as the obstructions are trees and foliage and not terrain. I would expect to be able to send a few bytes between two stations maybe 400m apart through non-line of sight forest with 900 MHz and both stations at the same elevation. Certainly the grandparent quoting miles would be for mountain top to mountain top.
        madengr 7y ago
        This is all assuming they use antennas that are optimized for the application. If they use a “chip” antenna, performance will suck.
  - hackcasual 7y ago
    Their site says using 915mhz, and the radios they recommend are all LoRa devices, so that's probably the best way of evaluating distance performance.
  - punkgeek 7y ago
    Oh yes, line of sight makes a big difference (also working as mesh helps for forwarding packets). Also we use a very high spreading factor so the bit rate becomes super low (with lots of chirps)
  - arrty88 7y ago
    Can you use MURS for this? Or potentially GMRS if the operators are licensed?
    - gh02t 7y ago
      Hmm... I'm pretty sure MURS allows for this type of traffic as of the last rules revision and would be ideal for this use with the higher power allowance, but MURS is a USA only thing so that kinda limits you if the goal is something that works all around the world. OP is also talking about using off the shelf LoRa boards and their project is more about the software, so they are stuck with the bands available on the commercial LoRa transceivers those boards use.
  - zensavona 7y ago
    I actually fly FPV drones and it’s amazing how far I can go and what obstacles I can penetrate with my 915mhz 2W control link with very usable latency (good antennas makes a huge difference as mentioned by others). 2-5km through thick city buildings etc at times.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  This is so cool... I spent six months doing research on a routing layer for mesh Android devices (using Bluetooth and Wifi). This would probably make a lot of what I originally tried out a lot easier. Edit: The issue was making a jump from a local cluster to another cluster far away as local messaging was easy but the further out, the harder it became to maintain connectivity since the amount of devices entering and leaving a mesh became a factor. We actually thought of using amateur radio (to basically allow you to extend the range using them for transfer)
  - sliken 7y ago
    My solution for this kind of thing is to support a router that connects to the internet. Then on the internet side run a DHT so all the internet routers/gateways can find each other. Each router would keep track of the devices they have seen recently, and publish them to a DHT. Much how running a bittorrent client for a particular torrent publishes that fact to the DHT so anyone on the planet can find peers of that torrent. So if Bob at a ski resort in Colorado want to message someone in Germany his message would propagate around the mesh until a gateway noticed it was for a client that hasn't ever been seen by that gateway. The gateway/router would do a DHT lookup, and would find a router in Germany had seen that user recently and forward the message there. Next time that router heard (directly or indirectly) that the recipient was online it would forward it (directly or through store and forward) to the user. Sure this process might take minutes, but generally it would still be useful. Imagine an island like Haiti or Puerto Rico is hit by a storm and only one in 5000 people has a cell signal or sat uplink. Add a mesh and just a few uplinks for the whole island and important communications could get through. Maybe even putting a sat uplink on a car that could drive around and allow messages in/out even just once a day could be quite valuable. This of course needs to be combined with store/forward messages and the other various delay tolerant network features. Seems much more useful than using HF radios to scan the planet for open Ham <-> email gateways. I was rather amused to hear that to communicate across Puerto Rico they often ended up sending messages through an email gateway they could reach in Italy... just to get messages across the island.
    - madengr 7y ago
- feteru 7y ago
  Looks awesome! Downloading the app, going to try it out on my T-BEAM that's been sitting dusty, and will definitely have an opportunity to test it soon.
- kawfey 7y ago
  Radio amateurs might be some suitable beta testers for you. It being an open source radio system fits right into the mission and spirit of amateur radio. However, I'll take the cynical route and say mesh radios, for the general public, are still not very popular. Gotenna and Beartooth, among others appear to be common and popular, and highly reviewed, but in my hikes and ski trips, I haven't seen or heard from a single one. I've seen FAR more basic FRS radios, and SPOT satellite messengers.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - punkgeek 7y ago
    FRS radios and SPOT are also awesome.
  - glassuser 7y ago
    I'm one of those amateurs. Gotenna is stupid expensive. And spot is pretty evil (or at least the instances I've encountered it). I think what most of the public expects from a radio device is PTT audio. Which isn't going to work with these low bitrate lora devices. I think if they got conditioned to some of this form factor, it would catch on a lot better.
- bloopernova 7y ago
  Is there anything I, as a sysadmin-by-experience, can do to help out? I don't have any relevant skills for radio or SDR stuff, but I'd love to mess around with it for a couple of hours a week.
  - myself248 7y ago
    I'm not involved with the project, but I think you can probably get this running. The hardware is cheap, the install instructions are pretty straightforward, and if you know which end of a USB cable is which, you'll be able to bumble through. Keep notes as you do, and that can feed directly into improving the documentation to be more noob-friendly. You'll find more ways to get involved from there, including just using and sharing the project with friends.
    - bloopernova 7y ago
      I'm adding myself to the Gitter channel and will hook up a radio to my home office Raspberry Pi. I'm excited to be a part of this! :) Thanks for the encouragement, by the way. I really appreciate that.
      - punkgeek 7y ago
        yep - what myself248 said. and yes, if you have questions just ask on the gitter channel and we'll all work together to help.
    - punkgeek 7y ago
      I just want to say: you seem like an awesome person. Keep being awesome!
- glassuser 7y ago
  Yeah I'm interested. I've been building something like this solo, but don't have the skill set to write a mobile app to go with it. I've got the spare parts to make a dozen widgets with a comparable feature set, but family life is keeping me from doing much of it. I know a guy in disaster response who would love to get his hands on a working prototype set to geek out over.
- l33tman 7y ago
  The LORA stuff is pretty cool in that the radio stack (if you can call it so, it's super little code) is open source and you can get complete modules with an STM32 and the associated LoRa radio circuitry and just add power and an antenna.
punkgeek 7y ago
and I'm a dumbass and put a typo in the url. correct is www.meshtastic.org
- lgats 7y ago
  https://www.meshtastic.org/ https://www.meshtastic.org/
  - dang 7y ago
    Fixed. Thanks!
- moeffju 7y ago
  Cc @dang / moderators to update?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
kpierce 7y ago
Maybe resubmit this post so the link works. I would love this for music festivals. They have some solutions but they are hundreds of dollars. If people in the group could put this on a backpack it would be a game-changer. Music festivals also have a big problem with internet access. If they could put host a few powerful repeaters in the middle with electrical and have 5% of attendees (staff) with these they could probably cover the entire place. Send out lineup changes or emergency notices.
- ajot 7y ago
  Off-topic, but once I stumbled upon an open source WiFi tower designed for an engineering thesis, and the use-case was a music festival; comparing to cellphone networks that are deployed with a truck, this was way cheaper and configurable. https://github.com/servalproject/foss-comms-tower https://github.com/servalproject/foss-comms-tower
- Fnoord 7y ago
  Solutions of hundreds of dollars? For what exactly? Reminds me of the movie Hackers where they used buzzers. And why not? The only thing you gotta do is use pre-planned keywords/acronyms. I went to several (music) festivals, big ones between 2002 till 2004 with a few smaller gigs later until 2009 or so. Back then we just used SMS or phone call. I didn't even always have a plan during the mentioned years. Especially outside the country (and NL is small) it was always a surprise to get the next phone bill (one time I paid something like 30 EUR per megabyte, in Serbia). Within the EU, these work with your normal plan nowadays. I don't know how it is nowadays, but back then on large festivals providers would put up extra (mobile) GSM antennas at the location. I assume they still do that. I can imagine there's a lot of smartphones up in the air to record the magical moment (and ruin it for the people behind you). That alone is a reason why I wouldn't wanna go. A dumbphone seems still clever if you go outside the country. A rugged one goes for say 30-50 EUR or so. It won't contain or give access to your whole life if it gets confiscated, no social media means you can focus on your stay, and you can still contact authorities or friends if required. Just make sure you add the personal information of those you need to contact (should be on your SIM, though possibly that's too much info as well). Oh, and the screen won't break or get damaged (if it does /care), and who cares if your dumbphone gets stolen. I suppose people generally take the risk, but I got burned once (got a digital camera as birthday present worth ~300 EUR in 2004 and it got stolen after I had it for less than a week). You can always give it away or sell it afterwards (like a real burner) or reuse it for the next journey. Now, back when I went to music festivals, you'd sortof stay together cause you could find each other but it was a bit annoying. If you could automate it, like you can give your position with WhatsApp, then that'd be great. However, with WhatsApp you decide who can access your location, while with this solution its available to all. That might not be what you want. Other sports like hiking, skiing I can imagine to use this technology. Even people who live "In The Wild" could meet up with other total strangers, if that's your thing. I mean imagine using this in some huge forest in Canada, or on Greenland where you suddenly notice another life form.
komcinity 7y ago
That’s an awesome project. I was interested in LoRa for the same reason. I’m an iOS dev and paraglider myself so I can help you with the iOS app. Let’s chat
- punkgeek 7y ago
  Oh would love to! Would you mind posting on our devchat and we can talk more? https://gitter.im/Meshtastic/community https://gitter.im/Meshtastic/community
ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
I guess my only advice is make sure the software keeps to the duty cycle limits of the license free band. And note that different countries may have different regulations on what is allowed on the frequency LoRa uses, if using it is even allowed.
- punkgeek 7y ago
  Oh yes, totally agree. We have a rough duty cycle spreadsheet now and we will be careful to obey the rules ;-)
  - myself248 7y ago
    That's the nice thing about 915 in the US, it's basically do-whatever. Not the case with 315/433, though! I'm a huge fan of 900MHz meshes, and have a basement full of Ricochet hardware. Starmode chat was the coolest thing in the world, but GPS's were expensive back then, so mobile nodes didn't know where they were. Stationary routers were programmed with their lat/lon when they were installed, and the MCDN mesh did geographic (distance-bearing) routing within them. On the Meshtastic site, it says the TTgo board is recommended "for most users", without saying why. It looks like this is because the GPS is built into the TTgo board but not the Heltec, but this isn't clearly explained. I picked up a few of the Heltec boards recently, because they were much more commonly available. I assume I can tack on a GPS to some random UART pins and tweak some pin assignments in a header file somewhere? If I have stable power and a high point somewhere, I'd be interested in running a repeater node that helps _everyone_'s traffic, not just my own friends who have the same encryption key loaded or whatever. Is there a way to do that, or can that be added as a feature request? Is there support for arbitrary data transport over the Lora layer; could I ssh from my phone, across the meshtstic lora, to my desktop at home sitting near another node?
    - ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
      >Is there support for arbitrary data transport over the Lora layer Seconding this, I am thinking about making ultra-remote seismometers that send back (highly compressed and carefully selected) readings via something like LoRa. I could use this as the transport layer and only have to worry about the sampling and processing. (Yes - I know about the raspberry shake. It has a lot of flaws with the design which is why I'm going for the redesign)
whalesalad 7y ago
Looks like you have already written a lot of low-level code for your device already (https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32 https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32) but have y'all considered taking a look at the Nerves project (https://nerves-project.org https://nerves-project.org)? You might uncover some really cool stuff in the Erlang/Elixir ecosystem for doing mesh communications.
- punkgeek 7y ago
  Thanks! alas, I think that is a bit to big for what we have to work with in our ESP32s. We started our sw design based on what off the shelf hardware we could find and worked from that.
zumzumzum 7y ago
How is it offering 'private' communications on the 33cm band? Does this band even offer good performance in hilly or mountainous terrain? These would be short range line of sight only type devices, correct? I'm still fairly new to amateur radio so I could be off. I don't see the advantage of this over something like APRS on 2M, with the exception that you don't need a license.
- punkgeek 7y ago
  encryption is allowed for low duty cycle digital usage on that band. I'm also a ham and really into APRS. But not requiring a license is a big plus, also the way these chirping radios achieve their long range with a super high noise floor so the battery life is amazing. i.e. a TTGO TBEAM will run for about eight days on (including the GPS/radio and CPU). And $30 for that board.
  - threeio 7y ago
    I was going to suggest that you look into some of the patents that were the basis for the old Ricochet Networks stuff as its the basis for most of the smartgrid meter tech, but apparently many of them are more recent than I expected and still under the 20 year mark... also might want to post it to /r/amateurradio for feedback... 73 om!
  - zumzumzum 7y ago
    Thanks for the reply! There is SO much to learn in this hobby. I'll definitely be following this project.
notlukesky 7y ago
It seems the website is down. I somehow wonder if it is from the Hacker News crowd.
- dsr_ 7y ago
  s/meshastic/meshtastic/
- punkgeek 7y ago
  yeah - I was a dumbass when I typed the URL. the correct url is www.meshtastic.org.
  - lultimouomo 7y ago
    Which means the post made it to the front page without a single person clicking on the link. Classic.
alexisread 7y ago
Not an expert by any means, but I'd suggest looking at the Dash7 protocol/ firmware as a reference for the mesh, security and positioning. It's been around a while and seems robust. Open source, royalty free, low power, high range (several km even in urban areas), medium bandwidth, runs on several lora boards. https://dash7-alliance.org/ https://dash7-alliance.org/
- punkgeek 7y ago
  ooh. That is great advice! We used the RadioHead mesh solution but it is super non optimal for us and we plan to switch. I'll definitely do some reading on DASH7.
  - alexisread 7y ago
    Firmware available at: https://github.com/jpnorair/OpenTag https://github.com/jpnorair/OpenTag
beering 7y ago
Not sure if this is "good" advice, but this would make for a very appealing kickstarter: cool gadget with very useful functionality for popular activities (music festivals, hiking, skiing) that could even help in an emergency. It hits a lot of the right notes. Possible that when you're further along you can have a kickstarter for a commercial version that's officially created by the open-source project. The more (mutually compatible) devices out there, the better the mesh, right?
- punkgeek 7y ago
  There are already a couple of companies doing similar kickstarters I think. But we want this to be a non profit open source project for fun. We are using a GPL license, but if someone wants to eventually sell devices (as long as they obey the GPL) with our code we think that's great.
  - davidzweig 7y ago
    The ESP32 draws quite a lot of current when running BLE (without Wifi), unless that's been fixed recently. IIRC, the TTGO boards have poor low-power design that will kill the 18650 battery in a few days, no matter what you do, that could perhaps be fixed with a small modification though. I have a hardware design that might be an interesting starting point. It's based around nrf52 (Cortex M4F with BLE and nice SDK), 400mah battery, microphone, speaker, 3*4 RGB LED matrix, gyro/accelerometer, NFC. Very small device, 35mm across. Can extend the top of the PCB, add a small OLED screen and a LORA radio. Hitting $30 price point shouldn't be a problem. Email in profile :-) https://photos.app.goo.gl/qUyrRYDrtu2SHsHR9 https://photos.app.goo.gl/qUyrRYDrtu2SHsHR9
leggomylibro 7y ago
Gotta love ESP32s, huh? It's great to see more affordable "commodity-style" boards with some extra radios built in. This looks like a very cool project - I might pick up a few of those 'T-beam' boards and see if some people want to try taking a hike with them. Thanks for sharing!
- punkgeek 7y ago
  no worries. if (when ;-)) you encounter problems just post on our gitter channel.
atourgates 7y ago
Really cool. Seems like an open-source mashup of something like Lynq https://lynqme.com/ https://lynqme.com/ - and Gotenna https://gotennamesh.com/ https://gotennamesh.com/ I've never liked Gotenna's requirement to be paired with a cellphone for tracking, so I've been watching Lynq's development for a while. But, I'd much rather have an open-source solution than one that depends on the fortunes and whims of a single compnay. Particularly if there was easy-to-use commercial hardware available with the open source software. The other downside of Lynq is that it doesn't use mesh networking, e.g., every Lynq unit can only communicate with other units it can connect to directly. That means if you have a group of 3 people all in a line, separated by 3-miles, only the person in the middle will be able to find the location of the entire group, and the people at the ends of the line would be invisible to each other. Anyway - all that to say - I'm super-excited for your project and wish you all the best.
- punkgeek 7y ago
  yes, that's what we thought also. Also, the phone is optional for our case (though you need it for sending texts - if you don't have one the display still shows rxed texts and headings/distance to members of the channel)
  - myself248 7y ago
    In my case, only the Heltec boards were easily available, and they lack the GPS that's in the TTgo boards. So I hope there's a way for the phone's GPS to participate! (Or, since the esp32 has bluetooth, recognize a bluetooth GPS puck? That's extra work and they're quite rare, so maybe nah.) Otherwise I'm totally fine soldering another GPS onto some random GPIO pins, I have a whole bag of those. I'm just not sure what it would take to get it recognized.
    - punkgeek 7y ago
      yes. If your radio doesn't have GPS the phone will provide GPS updates to the radio. Everything is treated identially (though there will be a bit higher battery consumption on both the phone and the radio)
aftbit 7y ago
Nice, I just picked up two of the TTGO T-Beam boards.
- bigiain 7y ago
  I have four on the way from China. I'm not holding my breath waiting for them though...
  - punkgeek 7y ago
    tell me about it. I have a box of 5 I ordered before CNY. Still sitting in china.
- techdevangelist 7y ago
  Just picked two up as well, looking forward to playing with this project!
  - punkgeek 7y ago
    cool! please ping us on the devchat when you try it out.
dkdk8283 7y ago
Anything like this out there for ethernet networks?
- dicknuckle 7y ago
  you want 1kbps?
rapjr9 7y ago
Note that there are limits to how large a mesh network can scale, it's likely to start running into problems with several hundred users. You can scale larger by limiting data to short text messages, but you'll probably never be able to handle more than 10,000 users, unless you can find a way to create high bandwidth backbone links between clusters of users. There has been a lot of research on this in the wireless sensor network research community and in the WiFi mesh network research community also. A concert going crowd could easily cause a mesh network to become un-useably slow if everyone was trying to use it at the same time.
- punkgeek 7y ago
  yes, this is targeted at hikers etc... so typical max mesh size of about 20 and I bet it would dying by the time a channel had 100 people.
  - sliken 7y ago
    Why? Even 200 in a small area, say a ski resort, mountain bike race, or similar seems perfectly reasonable. Sure not 200 people typing as fast as they can, but plenty for the normal chatter I hear over sms. Especially if you keep the messages short and have a latency of a few minutes be acceptable. Using the family radios (often $30 ish) on hiking trails, parks, amusement parks, etc. I usually hear minimal chatter, just things like "Anyone seen Bob?", "meet at lift #4", "Lunch in 30m?", "Linda stopped to retie her shoes", etc. Check out js8call if you want to see how to handle 100s of people with very little bandwidth. Sure it's designed for ham radio frequencies and covers 1000s of miles instead of 1000s of feet, but still man portable A phone, bluetooth sound card, a HF transceiver, and an antenna is all you need. Generally hams are proud when they get better than 1000 miles per watt.
    - punkgeek 7y ago
      a channel in this case is a set of friends who are on one common preshared key (and a hopping set of frequencies). So each mesh only cares about (or even sees) packets on that mesh. Lora is quite a slow bitrate protocol (but it has _great_ range and super low power needs). So we are focusing on our smaller use-case at first (in the interest of speed of development and stability for users)
pdoege 7y ago
I worked on a similar project for Motorola and it had limited commercial success. Very dense topologies need to aggressively handle broadcast storms such as ARP storms. Very fragmented topologies need to handle delay tolerant networking. In any event, search for "Mobile Ad-hoc Networks" will show work that has been done previously.
- punkgeek 7y ago
  thanks! yes, we are very delay tolerant and a typical text message (or flooded location update) takes a few seconds to get across our likely max # of hops (which is only three, due to our uhttps://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32/blob/master/docs/software/mesh-alg.mdsecase https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32/blob/master/d...) We initially used the RadioHead mesh router (which seems to be a variant of DSR), but we are switching to something else soon. Misc notes here: https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32/blob/master/docs/software/mesh-alg.md https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32/blob/master/d...
exabrial 7y ago
XBee it's already at an $30 and $15 price point, I think to 'disrupt' you would need to be profitable at a -10x price point. This is my opinion. I'm usually wrong. But you asked.
- mcstafford 7y ago
  > I'm usually wrong. That's either insightful, or sad... and I can relate.
  - exabrial 7y ago
    Haha not sad. It's hard to have an informed opinion, better to acknowledge it. I am impressed with the XBee series 3 modules that I've bought. Digi is 100% behind the product. The documentation is great. The engineering is of the 'we're go to the Moon' era not 'move fast and break things' crap the perforates startups. I'm very impressed so they're a tough entrenched to beat.
- punkgeek 7y ago
  Thank you. This is a full circuitboard with GPS+battery+lora+CPU+oled screen for $30. So I'm not trying to compete with a $15 radio devboard that someone has to solder into their project, but more something that 'just works'. And open source, for fun, so not selling it at all ;-)
  - airbreather 7y ago
    Maybe you could persuade M5Stack to do a version of hardware that suits. Looks like maybe they do already for $40 if you combine a base and LORA unit - https://m5stack.com/collections/m5-core https://m5stack.com/collections/m5-core https://m5stack.com/collections/m5-module https://m5stack.com/collections/m5-module
PVHSAlex 7y ago
15 year old High School sophomore noob here. We (crazily) are attempting to put up a CubeSat (shameless plug www.seakingspace.com). Using the Lora SX1268 433Mhz we tested the Semtech transceiver across the Catalina channel. 25+ Miles SF factors 7,9,11 at 125 BW. Worked great. We did a link budget and should work over 500KM line of sight no prob. The SX126X is the new improved version of the Lora chip. Im sure a verion with it will come out shortly.
- punkgeek 7y ago
  SUPER COOL. It sounds like you are using similar SFs to us. Rock on!
- airbreather 7y ago
  LoRaWAN® distance world record broken. 766 km (476 miles) using 25mW transmission power. After almost 2 years, the world record of 702 km (436 miles) has been broken.Aug 14, 2019 25mW, imagine what you could do with 1/2 a watt.
keiraarts 7y ago
Please get a newsletter up - would purchase this in a heartbeat.
- punkgeek 7y ago
  you can buy it now if you wanna guy a radio from aliexpress (not from us). see our website for info.
SamPatt 7y ago
This looks neat. How does this differ from disaster.radio? More portable? I ask because I really think these are important projects and I'm not sure which to contribute my time towards.
- punkgeek 7y ago
  We're working with those guys and might share the same protocol stack. Discussions underway. The difference is: disaster.radio is targeted as a "just in case emergency radio build on custom hardware, that joins a mesh with other folks who bought the same emergency radio." This is a $30 radio (with built in GPS+radio+CPU+battery+OLED screen) already available from a chinese mfg. Then you put our app on it and have a group navigator you can use with your friends while skiing or hiking, instead of buying a $100 closed source kickstarter (and it will run eight days on a charge)"
gardners 7y ago
Howdy, as the founder of the Serval Mesh adhoc networking protocols and hardware, what I would look for in a new radio is: 1. True packet radio mode, that doesn't hide the radioness of the link etc, but lets the programmer use it's strengths. 2. UART link, ideally using 3DR/RFD900 compatible connector (then we can include it directly in our existing systems, and so can others). 3. Field-flashable, but with robust protections on the boot loader, as it is not uncommon for a radio to be on the boot serial interface, on hardware that has only one serial port. 4. Support 434, 868 and 905-935MHz ISM bands. 5. Use advanced interference tolerant wave-forms, like Chirped Spread Spectrum or even something better. 6. Fully open chipset/firmware design, so that it can be truted. Anyway, poke me at paul@servalproject.org if you would like to talk further about it. Paul.
- punkgeek 7y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I think this project is a little bit different, we are focusing for now on making a nice end-user friendly consumer product using hardware that is already shipping from various aliexpress vendors. our tag line is "An opensource hiking, pilot, skiing, Signal-App-extending GPS mesh communicator for $30" We are currently using RadioHead mesh library, but we might shift to a common implementation with the disaster radio geeks. btw: Back when I was writing Andropilot I also wrote a fair portion of the code that is in those RFD900 radios (or at least was, I haven't checked in a while). I'm super glad you are using them!
  - th0ma5 7y ago
    Keep the hacking ability. Your large target demographic may not use or need it, but tinkerers will hype your product for free, at least in theory. See the RTL_SDR as an example, although it is a low cost DVB tuner.
    - punkgeek 7y ago
      oh yes - definitely want people to hack and add features (or use it as auto configuring pipes for other projects etc...). I'm just trying to say "at least for 1.0" we are trying to stay focused on this one primary thing. ;-)
masukomi 7y ago
The idea of these radio mesh network things is great. The reality is terrible because radio waves need line of sight unless you've got a repeater. This is completely impractical when hiking, or in a city filled with buildings. They end up with crazy short range between devices and you need an implausibly long string of them to get from a person off the grid to a mesh point on the grid. The only exception to this being someone high on a hill with no bumpy bits of other hills between them and whoever has the other mesh point that happens to be on-grid. Gotenna couldn't make this work with all their $$ because of the simple physics of radio waves. Yes they sell devices that technically do what they claim, they just fall flat on their faces when they encounter hills, or buildings... or anything that isn't flat. I think if you want to make something that actually works, you should drop the "consumer" and make having a ham radio license a requirement. Then use the GPS to find the closest public repeater. Their locations are pretty well mapped at this point. Use the most appropriate of the many ham radio digital packet systems for whatever wavelength you're broadcasting on and choose the appropriate part of the spectrum that is designated for digital packet use. Also be a good radio citizen and try other frequencies if the current one is in use. I understand that the ham license is pretty much a deal breaker for adoption BUT it's what's required to use the decent frequencies and access to repeaters. As this seems to be an open source kind of project and not a "hey lets sell bajillions" kinda thing, that seems like a plausible option.
- sliken 7y ago
  Dunno, I think one of the biggest weakness of various ham related technologies (and yes I have my general) is the assumption that everyone is online all the time. Trying to communicate with a few dozen people is very inefficient with amateur radio in general. It's usually voice, usually assumes everyone is doing nothing but listening, is listening continuously and has perfect reception. God forbid someone is driving, hiking aggressive terrain, or a group of 10 people is online only 60% of the time each. Most of the cheap ham stuff assumes a perfect repeater already to do the heavy lifting, which is nice when you have it, but very frustrating when you don't. I do wish that ham or consumer devices supported digital modes, peer to peer, store and forward, push, pull, query, etc. Js8call supports this, so you can do things like ask when someone was last seen, leave messages on 3rd parties, ask 3rd parties to forward, etc. So even if each radio is online part of the time, and parties that want to talk can not directly hear each other things work just fine. It's amazing to even think about, communicating several magnitudes below the noise floor, power levels so low that hams are proud when they get less than 1 watt per 1000 miles! Imagine standing on the west cost of the USA, shining a 5 watt flashlight at the sky, having it bounce off the sky, to land, and again into the sky, and again to the last to someone 1000s of miles away... and they can decode your signal. Amazing stuff. I do wonder what the smallest package you could fit a 1 watt bluetooth connected HF radio in to enable any phone to talk js8call.
Alex_P13 7y ago
Can you explain more... https://www.electronthemes.com/what-is-the-best-cms-between-wordpress-vs-ghost/ https://www.electronthemes.com/what-is-the-best-cms-between-...
numlock86 7y ago
What's the reasoning behind the $30? Seems pretty high considering the hardware platform.
- Acinyx 7y ago
  He didn't make the hardware, the higher end board with GPS, the TTGO TBEAM is about this expensive if you also add a oled screen.
Uhrheber 7y ago
I can see why you're using these boards, but the ESP32 is an incredibly power hungry device. For battery/solar power it's not the best choice. For devices in the field I'd use one of the many available low power ARM controllers.
- punkgeek 7y ago
  we are careful to keep the esp clock-gated almost all the time (esp calls this light-sleep), in that mode the power draw of the ESP is on 1.5mA. When the radio (or button press) receives a packet it wakes the main CPU, which then services everything (turning on bluetooth as needed) and then goes back to sleep. If you are curious for more details we have a power consumptions spreadsheet in our docs.
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
I’m interested, but we’ll see how it goes. This is a non-trivial endeavor. I’ve been trying to write an open-source Apple driver for goTenna units, and have been unable to get them to help me out by providing their BLE spec. That’s a shame, because I write really nice SDKs. Even if my driver was open and free, it would provide significant brand reinforcement. Win-win. I believe that this tech is important, as it can provide service in disasters. I’m also big on open-source. But I cut my teeth on RF stuff, and know that it’s a real black art. Software can get complicated, but is child’s play, compared to RF tech. You have your work cut out for you.
- punkgeek 7y ago
  The current alpha works pretty well. (I'm sort of retired now, but my old job included writing software for these sorts of radios). If you'd like to play with this project we'd love your help (and we have a documented ble api). Here's an issue where various iOS types are ideating on possibly making an iOS app: https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32/issues/14 https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32/issues/14
  - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
    I'll probably look at it in a few days. I'm actually in the middle of creating a Web-based instruction series on writing Core Bluetooth SDKs for Apple platforms (not just iOS). Once I get that done, I may look at adapting this project: https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_GTDriver https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_GTDriver For it. It started as a goTenna project, but they never got around to helping me out, so I gave up on them, and made it an OBD driver. The infrastructure is still there for all kinds of stuff, so I could probably do something. BTW: If that works out, it would be an SDK that would afford ALL Apple platforms; including Watch and TV.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
    Just FYI. I ordered a couple of units, and will work on a native Swift SDK for the project, once I get them (AliExpress said "20-40 days"). In the meantime, I have my work cut out for me.
maufl 7y ago
This is awesome! It looks like it could do several things for which I wanted to have a device. Offline GPS tracker with very long run time for hiking. I'd like up to one month run time. On the other hand I only need low time resolution, one waypoint each minute. It also does not need to send the location anywhere, storing it local is fine. Offline/Online GPS tracker for paragliding. Battery for one day, but also high resolution tracking, about one waypoint per second. Long range communication extender for my mobile phone that does not require infrastructure like base stations. (For the prepper in me)
- OnACoffeeBreak 7y ago
  This Garmin device in Expedition mode might work for you. It seems to have configurable GPS logging and inReach satellite coms. https://forums.garmin.com/outdoor-recreation/inreach/f/gpsmap-66i/214719/gpsmap-66i-battery-life-i-m-on-the-fence https://forums.garmin.com/outdoor-recreation/inreach/f/gpsma...
- punkgeek 7y ago
  current battery life is about 3 days and will soon be eight days. See our power calculations spreadsheet, but with with scheduled broadcast intervals (because we have GPS time) it is fairly feasible to reach 30 days between charging. I'm also a (retired, but formerly very active) paraglider and that was a big motivator for me.
jokoon 7y ago
It's not a new idea, but it's really a cool project, it just seems difficult to democratize. Problem #1: if users need a custom antenna, it's already a barrier. /me dreams about the IEEE people designing standards that would enable smartphones to use mesh networking... I guess a tiny antenna that can be attached to a smartphone could also make it viable. If the antenna is not bigger than the phone, it would certainly be marketed. In my view, mesh radio could possibly compete with traditional ISPs, for certain uses, so this kind of tech might not be funded for obvious reasons.
anilakar 7y ago
How will you make sure your customers will be in compliance when operating the device? GoTenna used to have a nice photo gallery of people breaking the law, i.e. using their earlier MURS-band mesh devices abroad.
timini 7y ago
Has anyone here discussed the avalanche rescue as a use case?
uitwear2 7y ago
Would be great to have LoraWan redundancy, say with the things network, if in range. From my experience, 8 days battery life with TTGO-beam is unrealistic, unless sleeping for most of the time, or with some hardware modifications. Great project, I will test it out!
fh973 7y ago
This is very similar to FLARM devices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLARM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLARM) for ultralights, gliders, etc. This is already broadly deployed (at least in Europe). You could check for any lessons learned there. I think you can discount any flight users, because they would like to be seen too by other airplanes.
- efesak 7y ago
  FLARM is very bad example especialy for DIY community. They have proprietary chips, firmware and are running non opensourced protocol. Also they are actively trying to prevent reverse engineering with cryptography and killing old/diy devices with protocol timebombs...
  - fh973 7y ago
    Yes, I am also not enthusiastic about the crypto part, but then if it prevents people from spoofing signals, it is probably a good decision. The wikipedia suggests they use standard hardware components?
ruslan 7y ago
Before you proceed any further, please consider aquiring our patent: RU2559714. More details on our communication device: http://www.videoptt.com/ http://www.videoptt.com/
- Hitton 7y ago
  They don't try to transmit video so stop your patent trolling.
mikehollinger 7y ago
Go have a look at https://www.project-owl.com/ https://www.project-owl.com/ when you have a moment. They’re tackling similar problems but from a different angle. Doesn’t mean there isn’t room for both!
wwn_se 7y ago
This looks promising. Some form of Repeater/Server or similar feature would be great. A small webserver that the phone can use as a backbone would be really useful. I might even try to help with developing one.
reisr3 7y ago
This is awesome, thanks for sharing! I'm considering using this for a project where I need to measure distance between two nodes. Couple questions: 1. You mention "location and distance" between member nodes. I assume this is based on the LORA RSSI? How precise is the reading? 2. Do you support the "TTGO LORA32"? Your Github Readme mentions it, but Pages does not. 3. Will the TTGO LORA32 and Heltec LoRa 32 measure distance without being connected to a phone?
- alfla 7y ago
  If the nodes have GPS it's fairly straightforward to calculate distance and bearing.
  - reisr3 7y ago
    Right, and accuracy of ~9m makes sense for this application. The smaller supported ESP32's, however, don't have onboard GPS. Does it use RSSI or need to be paired with a phone? Not that it's really relevant here, but I'm wondering if the LORA RSSI can be used to determine distance inside 9m.
ruslan 7y ago
I'm just curious why my comment regarding patent was deleted ? Yes we developed a device that implements this same idea of sharing GPS data over mesh (868 ISM) network and patented it in 2014. The patent is still valid and supported. If someone is interested in further development of this idea, please contact me, we would be happy to sell this patent along with schematics and source codes for fair price.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  Raising awareness that something is patented on a public forum isn't considered polite. Knowledge of something being patented changes potential damages to punitive damages, making potential lawsuit costs 3x. Hence, nearly all tech industries prevent discussion of patent specifics outside forums designed for patent discussion. Otherwise anyone who reads this page is increasing their liability 3x, which isn't what HN wants to inflict on its users.
- luma 7y ago
  Your post said nothing about the patent itself, and simply stated that this open source project should be paying you. It's not exactly the best approach on a site like this. How about outlining the specific patent claims you feel are being violated here, along with links to the patents in question? That approach would feel a lot more helpful and a lot less like a shakedown. If you've somehow managed to get a patent on sending GPS coords over LoRa I think a lot of people in this space are going to be interested in that. Nearly every LoRa application in the field is going to find themselves in violation.
  - ruslan 7y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I'm not a patent troll, neither I want to sue anyone - that is against my attutude (I consider myself an old time hacker rooting from late 80s :)). I'm just a co-developer and co-holder of the patent for a device that does, among other things, exactly what topic starter described. We began developing it back in 2011 and proceeded for several years, we had been spending our free time and "pocket" money on it. In case you are interested it took us to route and assemble 22 versions of PCB prototype of the main board and 5 prototypes of a radio. We even exhibited it at one of the electronics show in Moscow. As we failed to find sufficient investment to push it to the market, we decided to freeze the project in 2015. In my initial comment that was silently and shamefully deleted, I proposed to aquire our patent, that's what might have any value today, as schematics and hardware are all outdated. As mentioned above, discussing patent details on public is not any good idea, that is why I simply pointed that I can be contacted on these matters. I understand that hackers are strictly opposed to any sort of patents or copyright. But it is not avoidable topic once you are into business of settling or growing your own company (or a startup). And this is a startup place, isn't it ?
EGreg 7y ago
We have (local ad hoc social networking) software that would be very useful to run on your mesh networks. What’s the best way to contact you?
- punkgeek 7y ago
  sure! either chat on our gitter chat (link at www.meshtastic.org) or send me an email at kevinh@geeksville.com.
deedubaya 7y ago
Very cool. There is a general fear in the backcountry Skiing community that any RF devices might impede or negatively impact the use of search and recovery beacons to locate buried partners in the event of an avalanche. Any documentation/speculation on any potential interference?
- bradstewart 7y ago
  I dabble in both backcountry and skiing and wireless devices, but I'm not an expert on either. My take on this: these devices should be safe to carry provided the hardware is verified to not produce spurious harmonics (via FCC certification or other means). The 900Mhz band used (in the US) by these radios will not interfere with 457KHz signals used by beacons. I wouldn't carry it in the same pocket as my beacon, but I would use this device--definitely excited to watch the project's progress.
dlumpkin 7y ago
This is a great idea, especially for tracking kids. I'd love to leave one of these in my kids backpack and know where they were without depending on a cellular-device/service-plan/charging/etc
vkaku 7y ago
Make the mesh affordable, keep making the drivers and interfaces clean and reasonably easy to maintain. In mass adoption, you want to keep the price right - so have a bulk pricing upfront. Also, keep one access protocol you can access from a phone / PC / most popular devices. You're doing everything right. Try to get one great customer who can benefit from this today.
wingworks 7y ago
Sounds promising, but as someone who tramps a decent amount, I love as much range as possible without needing a sat phone. I've got 2 gotenna, and they're not so great, very short range. Maybe 1km in hilly areas.
wildylion 7y ago
You can try to contact those Russian guys at http://stratonautica.ru/ http://stratonautica.ru/. They were making a project __exactly__ like this, with LoRa (with modifications?) but for location tracking. And if anybody is interested, I'm actively trying to cook up a neat solution with DMR radios - it just works better than the LoRa ones so far :). Into amateur radio, Digital voice, DMR, SAR, Location tracking and really looking up to https://www.sartrack.co.nz/ https://www.sartrack.co.nz/.
- wildylion 7y ago
  Also, am Russian and https://lizaalert.org https://lizaalert.org volunteer. Would be happy to see you on the bands if you've got a call, come over to TG 250661 GMT+3, daytime. 73s.

620 points by punkgeek 7y ago

Hi ya'll, so we've spent a few weeks making device software and an android app to convert a $30 chinese gps/radio into a long range mesh radio for hikers. It is working fairly well now (though still an alpha) and we'd love more people to try it and/or have fun coding on it. We got about 30 users (and some devs from this hackaday article) but we'd love more users and devs to join this happy-happy project: https://hackaday.com/2020/02/26/lora-mesh-network-with-off-the-shelf-hardware/ https://hackaday.com/2020/02/26/lora-mesh-network-with-off-t... I'm happy to respond to any questions or comments...

hobs 7y ago
That's awesome, this kind of thing was the first idea I had when I saw the LoRa radios, but was far too lazy to start doing :p still have the hardware at home; ill see if I can install it later.
- punkgeek 7y ago
  awesome! we'd love to have you join us ;-)
jkoberg 7y ago
What frequency band are you using? ISM is the only one that permits store-and-forward / automatic operation, as the gotenna people found. You say a few miles per node - I am having trouble seeing how that's possible without elevating all the nodes
- superkuh 7y ago
  He's gotta be assuming the nodes have clear line of sight and fresnel zone. The maximum distance for the link budget in a perfect situation. In practice it probably cuts off at the nearest rise in the ground or depression. But they're still cool and I still want some for non-hiking applications. With the very low power idle and low cost they could be set up with solar panels in the tops of trees or in similar high height above terrain positions.
  - generatorguy 7y ago
    915 MHz goes a lot farther than 2.4 GHz. At very low bit rates you need very little SNR. There is probably very low noise out in hiking environments. Yes, attenuation due to terrain is going to be a killer, but my experience with non line of sight 900 MHz links blasting through trees leads me to believe it would be workable for low bit rate data between a series of hikers along the same trail. It is sending only location and text messages so intermittent link status or re-tries due to temporarily terrain/foliage obstructions will not cause degradation in service that you would experience trying to watch netflix over this mesh.
    - superkuh 7y ago
      You're wrong. It's a mistake to treat terrain and foliage as the same thing. I have extensive experience with 3 completely different, narrowband and wideband, 902-928 MHz radio data systems as well as just playing around in the range with my software defined radios (hackrf, rtlsdr, etc). 902-928 has almost no advantage over 2.4 GHz when it comes to line of sight issues with terrain. In fact, it's more problematic due to the increased size of the fresnel zone. Sure, it does better through trees but a slight rise of ground is just as much of a problem for 915 and 2400. The freq here isn't helping much. It's the chirp and LORA modulation helping the link budget. But no line of sight is no line of sight.
      - generatorguy 7y ago
        It sounds like you agree 900 MHz will be much better than 2.4 GHz in this non line of sight application so long as the obstructions are trees and foliage and not terrain. I would expect to be able to send a few bytes between two stations maybe 400m apart through non-line of sight forest with 900 MHz and both stations at the same elevation. Certainly the grandparent quoting miles would be for mountain top to mountain top.
        madengr 7y ago
        This is all assuming they use antennas that are optimized for the application. If they use a “chip” antenna, performance will suck.
- hackcasual 7y ago
  Their site says using 915mhz, and the radios they recommend are all LoRa devices, so that's probably the best way of evaluating distance performance.
- punkgeek 7y ago
  Oh yes, line of sight makes a big difference (also working as mesh helps for forwarding packets). Also we use a very high spreading factor so the bit rate becomes super low (with lots of chirps)
- arrty88 7y ago
  Can you use MURS for this? Or potentially GMRS if the operators are licensed?
  - gh02t 7y ago
    Hmm... I'm pretty sure MURS allows for this type of traffic as of the last rules revision and would be ideal for this use with the higher power allowance, but MURS is a USA only thing so that kinda limits you if the goal is something that works all around the world. OP is also talking about using off the shelf LoRa boards and their project is more about the software, so they are stuck with the bands available on the commercial LoRa transceivers those boards use.
- zensavona 7y ago
  I actually fly FPV drones and it’s amazing how far I can go and what obstacles I can penetrate with my 915mhz 2W control link with very usable latency (good antennas makes a huge difference as mentioned by others). 2-5km through thick city buildings etc at times.
WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
This is so cool... I spent six months doing research on a routing layer for mesh Android devices (using Bluetooth and Wifi). This would probably make a lot of what I originally tried out a lot easier. Edit: The issue was making a jump from a local cluster to another cluster far away as local messaging was easy but the further out, the harder it became to maintain connectivity since the amount of devices entering and leaving a mesh became a factor. We actually thought of using amateur radio (to basically allow you to extend the range using them for transfer)
- sliken 7y ago
  My solution for this kind of thing is to support a router that connects to the internet. Then on the internet side run a DHT so all the internet routers/gateways can find each other. Each router would keep track of the devices they have seen recently, and publish them to a DHT. Much how running a bittorrent client for a particular torrent publishes that fact to the DHT so anyone on the planet can find peers of that torrent. So if Bob at a ski resort in Colorado want to message someone in Germany his message would propagate around the mesh until a gateway noticed it was for a client that hasn't ever been seen by that gateway. The gateway/router would do a DHT lookup, and would find a router in Germany had seen that user recently and forward the message there. Next time that router heard (directly or indirectly) that the recipient was online it would forward it (directly or through store and forward) to the user. Sure this process might take minutes, but generally it would still be useful. Imagine an island like Haiti or Puerto Rico is hit by a storm and only one in 5000 people has a cell signal or sat uplink. Add a mesh and just a few uplinks for the whole island and important communications could get through. Maybe even putting a sat uplink on a car that could drive around and allow messages in/out even just once a day could be quite valuable. This of course needs to be combined with store/forward messages and the other various delay tolerant network features. Seems much more useful than using HF radios to scan the planet for open Ham <-> email gateways. I was rather amused to hear that to communicate across Puerto Rico they often ended up sending messages through an email gateway they could reach in Italy... just to get messages across the island.
  - madengr 7y ago
feteru 7y ago
Looks awesome! Downloading the app, going to try it out on my T-BEAM that's been sitting dusty, and will definitely have an opportunity to test it soon.
kawfey 7y ago
Radio amateurs might be some suitable beta testers for you. It being an open source radio system fits right into the mission and spirit of amateur radio. However, I'll take the cynical route and say mesh radios, for the general public, are still not very popular. Gotenna and Beartooth, among others appear to be common and popular, and highly reviewed, but in my hikes and ski trips, I haven't seen or heard from a single one. I've seen FAR more basic FRS radios, and SPOT satellite messengers.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- punkgeek 7y ago
  FRS radios and SPOT are also awesome.
- glassuser 7y ago
  I'm one of those amateurs. Gotenna is stupid expensive. And spot is pretty evil (or at least the instances I've encountered it). I think what most of the public expects from a radio device is PTT audio. Which isn't going to work with these low bitrate lora devices. I think if they got conditioned to some of this form factor, it would catch on a lot better.
bloopernova 7y ago
Is there anything I, as a sysadmin-by-experience, can do to help out? I don't have any relevant skills for radio or SDR stuff, but I'd love to mess around with it for a couple of hours a week.
- myself248 7y ago
  I'm not involved with the project, but I think you can probably get this running. The hardware is cheap, the install instructions are pretty straightforward, and if you know which end of a USB cable is which, you'll be able to bumble through. Keep notes as you do, and that can feed directly into improving the documentation to be more noob-friendly. You'll find more ways to get involved from there, including just using and sharing the project with friends.
  - bloopernova 7y ago
    I'm adding myself to the Gitter channel and will hook up a radio to my home office Raspberry Pi. I'm excited to be a part of this! :) Thanks for the encouragement, by the way. I really appreciate that.
    - punkgeek 7y ago
      yep - what myself248 said. and yes, if you have questions just ask on the gitter channel and we'll all work together to help.
  - punkgeek 7y ago
    I just want to say: you seem like an awesome person. Keep being awesome!
glassuser 7y ago
Yeah I'm interested. I've been building something like this solo, but don't have the skill set to write a mobile app to go with it. I've got the spare parts to make a dozen widgets with a comparable feature set, but family life is keeping me from doing much of it. I know a guy in disaster response who would love to get his hands on a working prototype set to geek out over.
l33tman 7y ago
The LORA stuff is pretty cool in that the radio stack (if you can call it so, it's super little code) is open source and you can get complete modules with an STM32 and the associated LoRa radio circuitry and just add power and an antenna.

punkgeek 7y ago

and I'm a dumbass and put a typo in the url. correct is www.meshtastic.org

lgats 7y ago
https://www.meshtastic.org/ https://www.meshtastic.org/
- dang 7y ago
  Fixed. Thanks!
moeffju 7y ago
Cc @dang / moderators to update?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

kpierce 7y ago

Maybe resubmit this post so the link works. I would love this for music festivals. They have some solutions but they are hundreds of dollars. If people in the group could put this on a backpack it would be a game-changer. Music festivals also have a big problem with internet access. If they could put host a few powerful repeaters in the middle with electrical and have 5% of attendees (staff) with these they could probably cover the entire place. Send out lineup changes or emergency notices.

ajot 7y ago
Off-topic, but once I stumbled upon an open source WiFi tower designed for an engineering thesis, and the use-case was a music festival; comparing to cellphone networks that are deployed with a truck, this was way cheaper and configurable. https://github.com/servalproject/foss-comms-tower https://github.com/servalproject/foss-comms-tower
Fnoord 7y ago
Solutions of hundreds of dollars? For what exactly? Reminds me of the movie Hackers where they used buzzers. And why not? The only thing you gotta do is use pre-planned keywords/acronyms. I went to several (music) festivals, big ones between 2002 till 2004 with a few smaller gigs later until 2009 or so. Back then we just used SMS or phone call. I didn't even always have a plan during the mentioned years. Especially outside the country (and NL is small) it was always a surprise to get the next phone bill (one time I paid something like 30 EUR per megabyte, in Serbia). Within the EU, these work with your normal plan nowadays. I don't know how it is nowadays, but back then on large festivals providers would put up extra (mobile) GSM antennas at the location. I assume they still do that. I can imagine there's a lot of smartphones up in the air to record the magical moment (and ruin it for the people behind you). That alone is a reason why I wouldn't wanna go. A dumbphone seems still clever if you go outside the country. A rugged one goes for say 30-50 EUR or so. It won't contain or give access to your whole life if it gets confiscated, no social media means you can focus on your stay, and you can still contact authorities or friends if required. Just make sure you add the personal information of those you need to contact (should be on your SIM, though possibly that's too much info as well). Oh, and the screen won't break or get damaged (if it does /care), and who cares if your dumbphone gets stolen. I suppose people generally take the risk, but I got burned once (got a digital camera as birthday present worth ~300 EUR in 2004 and it got stolen after I had it for less than a week). You can always give it away or sell it afterwards (like a real burner) or reuse it for the next journey. Now, back when I went to music festivals, you'd sortof stay together cause you could find each other but it was a bit annoying. If you could automate it, like you can give your position with WhatsApp, then that'd be great. However, with WhatsApp you decide who can access your location, while with this solution its available to all. That might not be what you want. Other sports like hiking, skiing I can imagine to use this technology. Even people who live "In The Wild" could meet up with other total strangers, if that's your thing. I mean imagine using this in some huge forest in Canada, or on Greenland where you suddenly notice another life form.

komcinity 7y ago

That’s an awesome project. I was interested in LoRa for the same reason. I’m an iOS dev and paraglider myself so I can help you with the iOS app. Let’s chat

punkgeek 7y ago
Oh would love to! Would you mind posting on our devchat and we can talk more? https://gitter.im/Meshtastic/community https://gitter.im/Meshtastic/community

ourlordcaffeine 7y ago

I guess my only advice is make sure the software keeps to the duty cycle limits of the license free band. And note that different countries may have different regulations on what is allowed on the frequency LoRa uses, if using it is even allowed.

punkgeek 7y ago
Oh yes, totally agree. We have a rough duty cycle spreadsheet now and we will be careful to obey the rules ;-)
- myself248 7y ago
  That's the nice thing about 915 in the US, it's basically do-whatever. Not the case with 315/433, though! I'm a huge fan of 900MHz meshes, and have a basement full of Ricochet hardware. Starmode chat was the coolest thing in the world, but GPS's were expensive back then, so mobile nodes didn't know where they were. Stationary routers were programmed with their lat/lon when they were installed, and the MCDN mesh did geographic (distance-bearing) routing within them. On the Meshtastic site, it says the TTgo board is recommended "for most users", without saying why. It looks like this is because the GPS is built into the TTgo board but not the Heltec, but this isn't clearly explained. I picked up a few of the Heltec boards recently, because they were much more commonly available. I assume I can tack on a GPS to some random UART pins and tweak some pin assignments in a header file somewhere? If I have stable power and a high point somewhere, I'd be interested in running a repeater node that helps _everyone_'s traffic, not just my own friends who have the same encryption key loaded or whatever. Is there a way to do that, or can that be added as a feature request? Is there support for arbitrary data transport over the Lora layer; could I ssh from my phone, across the meshtstic lora, to my desktop at home sitting near another node?
  - ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
    >Is there support for arbitrary data transport over the Lora layer Seconding this, I am thinking about making ultra-remote seismometers that send back (highly compressed and carefully selected) readings via something like LoRa. I could use this as the transport layer and only have to worry about the sampling and processing. (Yes - I know about the raspberry shake. It has a lot of flaws with the design which is why I'm going for the redesign)

whalesalad 7y ago

Looks like you have already written a lot of low-level code for your device already (https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32 https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32) but have y'all considered taking a look at the Nerves project (https://nerves-project.org https://nerves-project.org)? You might uncover some really cool stuff in the Erlang/Elixir ecosystem for doing mesh communications.

punkgeek 7y ago
Thanks! alas, I think that is a bit to big for what we have to work with in our ESP32s. We started our sw design based on what off the shelf hardware we could find and worked from that.

zumzumzum 7y ago

How is it offering 'private' communications on the 33cm band? Does this band even offer good performance in hilly or mountainous terrain? These would be short range line of sight only type devices, correct? I'm still fairly new to amateur radio so I could be off. I don't see the advantage of this over something like APRS on 2M, with the exception that you don't need a license.

punkgeek 7y ago
encryption is allowed for low duty cycle digital usage on that band. I'm also a ham and really into APRS. But not requiring a license is a big plus, also the way these chirping radios achieve their long range with a super high noise floor so the battery life is amazing. i.e. a TTGO TBEAM will run for about eight days on (including the GPS/radio and CPU). And $30 for that board.
- threeio 7y ago
  I was going to suggest that you look into some of the patents that were the basis for the old Ricochet Networks stuff as its the basis for most of the smartgrid meter tech, but apparently many of them are more recent than I expected and still under the 20 year mark... also might want to post it to /r/amateurradio for feedback... 73 om!
- zumzumzum 7y ago
  Thanks for the reply! There is SO much to learn in this hobby. I'll definitely be following this project.

notlukesky 7y ago

It seems the website is down. I somehow wonder if it is from the Hacker News crowd.

dsr_ 7y ago
s/meshastic/meshtastic/
punkgeek 7y ago
yeah - I was a dumbass when I typed the URL. the correct url is www.meshtastic.org.
- lultimouomo 7y ago
  Which means the post made it to the front page without a single person clicking on the link. Classic.

alexisread 7y ago

Not an expert by any means, but I'd suggest looking at the Dash7 protocol/ firmware as a reference for the mesh, security and positioning. It's been around a while and seems robust. Open source, royalty free, low power, high range (several km even in urban areas), medium bandwidth, runs on several lora boards. https://dash7-alliance.org/ https://dash7-alliance.org/

punkgeek 7y ago
ooh. That is great advice! We used the RadioHead mesh solution but it is super non optimal for us and we plan to switch. I'll definitely do some reading on DASH7.
- alexisread 7y ago
  Firmware available at: https://github.com/jpnorair/OpenTag https://github.com/jpnorair/OpenTag

beering 7y ago

Not sure if this is "good" advice, but this would make for a very appealing kickstarter: cool gadget with very useful functionality for popular activities (music festivals, hiking, skiing) that could even help in an emergency. It hits a lot of the right notes. Possible that when you're further along you can have a kickstarter for a commercial version that's officially created by the open-source project. The more (mutually compatible) devices out there, the better the mesh, right?

punkgeek 7y ago
There are already a couple of companies doing similar kickstarters I think. But we want this to be a non profit open source project for fun. We are using a GPL license, but if someone wants to eventually sell devices (as long as they obey the GPL) with our code we think that's great.
- davidzweig 7y ago
  The ESP32 draws quite a lot of current when running BLE (without Wifi), unless that's been fixed recently. IIRC, the TTGO boards have poor low-power design that will kill the 18650 battery in a few days, no matter what you do, that could perhaps be fixed with a small modification though. I have a hardware design that might be an interesting starting point. It's based around nrf52 (Cortex M4F with BLE and nice SDK), 400mah battery, microphone, speaker, 3*4 RGB LED matrix, gyro/accelerometer, NFC. Very small device, 35mm across. Can extend the top of the PCB, add a small OLED screen and a LORA radio. Hitting $30 price point shouldn't be a problem. Email in profile :-) https://photos.app.goo.gl/qUyrRYDrtu2SHsHR9 https://photos.app.goo.gl/qUyrRYDrtu2SHsHR9

leggomylibro 7y ago

Gotta love ESP32s, huh? It's great to see more affordable "commodity-style" boards with some extra radios built in. This looks like a very cool project - I might pick up a few of those 'T-beam' boards and see if some people want to try taking a hike with them. Thanks for sharing!

punkgeek 7y ago
no worries. if (when ;-)) you encounter problems just post on our gitter channel.

atourgates 7y ago

Really cool. Seems like an open-source mashup of something like Lynq https://lynqme.com/ https://lynqme.com/ - and Gotenna https://gotennamesh.com/ https://gotennamesh.com/ I've never liked Gotenna's requirement to be paired with a cellphone for tracking, so I've been watching Lynq's development for a while. But, I'd much rather have an open-source solution than one that depends on the fortunes and whims of a single compnay. Particularly if there was easy-to-use commercial hardware available with the open source software. The other downside of Lynq is that it doesn't use mesh networking, e.g., every Lynq unit can only communicate with other units it can connect to directly. That means if you have a group of 3 people all in a line, separated by 3-miles, only the person in the middle will be able to find the location of the entire group, and the people at the ends of the line would be invisible to each other. Anyway - all that to say - I'm super-excited for your project and wish you all the best.

punkgeek 7y ago
yes, that's what we thought also. Also, the phone is optional for our case (though you need it for sending texts - if you don't have one the display still shows rxed texts and headings/distance to members of the channel)
- myself248 7y ago
  In my case, only the Heltec boards were easily available, and they lack the GPS that's in the TTgo boards. So I hope there's a way for the phone's GPS to participate! (Or, since the esp32 has bluetooth, recognize a bluetooth GPS puck? That's extra work and they're quite rare, so maybe nah.) Otherwise I'm totally fine soldering another GPS onto some random GPIO pins, I have a whole bag of those. I'm just not sure what it would take to get it recognized.
  - punkgeek 7y ago
    yes. If your radio doesn't have GPS the phone will provide GPS updates to the radio. Everything is treated identially (though there will be a bit higher battery consumption on both the phone and the radio)

aftbit 7y ago

Nice, I just picked up two of the TTGO T-Beam boards.

bigiain 7y ago
I have four on the way from China. I'm not holding my breath waiting for them though...
- punkgeek 7y ago
  tell me about it. I have a box of 5 I ordered before CNY. Still sitting in china.
techdevangelist 7y ago
Just picked two up as well, looking forward to playing with this project!
- punkgeek 7y ago
  cool! please ping us on the devchat when you try it out.

dkdk8283 7y ago

Anything like this out there for ethernet networks?

dicknuckle 7y ago
you want 1kbps?

rapjr9 7y ago

Note that there are limits to how large a mesh network can scale, it's likely to start running into problems with several hundred users. You can scale larger by limiting data to short text messages, but you'll probably never be able to handle more than 10,000 users, unless you can find a way to create high bandwidth backbone links between clusters of users. There has been a lot of research on this in the wireless sensor network research community and in the WiFi mesh network research community also. A concert going crowd could easily cause a mesh network to become un-useably slow if everyone was trying to use it at the same time.

punkgeek 7y ago
yes, this is targeted at hikers etc... so typical max mesh size of about 20 and I bet it would dying by the time a channel had 100 people.
- sliken 7y ago
  Why? Even 200 in a small area, say a ski resort, mountain bike race, or similar seems perfectly reasonable. Sure not 200 people typing as fast as they can, but plenty for the normal chatter I hear over sms. Especially if you keep the messages short and have a latency of a few minutes be acceptable. Using the family radios (often $30 ish) on hiking trails, parks, amusement parks, etc. I usually hear minimal chatter, just things like "Anyone seen Bob?", "meet at lift #4", "Lunch in 30m?", "Linda stopped to retie her shoes", etc. Check out js8call if you want to see how to handle 100s of people with very little bandwidth. Sure it's designed for ham radio frequencies and covers 1000s of miles instead of 1000s of feet, but still man portable A phone, bluetooth sound card, a HF transceiver, and an antenna is all you need. Generally hams are proud when they get better than 1000 miles per watt.
  - punkgeek 7y ago
    a channel in this case is a set of friends who are on one common preshared key (and a hopping set of frequencies). So each mesh only cares about (or even sees) packets on that mesh. Lora is quite a slow bitrate protocol (but it has _great_ range and super low power needs). So we are focusing on our smaller use-case at first (in the interest of speed of development and stability for users)

pdoege 7y ago

I worked on a similar project for Motorola and it had limited commercial success. Very dense topologies need to aggressively handle broadcast storms such as ARP storms. Very fragmented topologies need to handle delay tolerant networking. In any event, search for "Mobile Ad-hoc Networks" will show work that has been done previously.

punkgeek 7y ago
thanks! yes, we are very delay tolerant and a typical text message (or flooded location update) takes a few seconds to get across our likely max # of hops (which is only three, due to our uhttps://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32/blob/master/docs/software/mesh-alg.mdsecase https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32/blob/master/d...) We initially used the RadioHead mesh router (which seems to be a variant of DSR), but we are switching to something else soon. Misc notes here: https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32/blob/master/docs/software/mesh-alg.md https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32/blob/master/d...

exabrial 7y ago

XBee it's already at an $30 and $15 price point, I think to 'disrupt' you would need to be profitable at a -10x price point. This is my opinion. I'm usually wrong. But you asked.

mcstafford 7y ago
> I'm usually wrong. That's either insightful, or sad... and I can relate.
- exabrial 7y ago
  Haha not sad. It's hard to have an informed opinion, better to acknowledge it. I am impressed with the XBee series 3 modules that I've bought. Digi is 100% behind the product. The documentation is great. The engineering is of the 'we're go to the Moon' era not 'move fast and break things' crap the perforates startups. I'm very impressed so they're a tough entrenched to beat.
punkgeek 7y ago
Thank you. This is a full circuitboard with GPS+battery+lora+CPU+oled screen for $30. So I'm not trying to compete with a $15 radio devboard that someone has to solder into their project, but more something that 'just works'. And open source, for fun, so not selling it at all ;-)
- airbreather 7y ago
  Maybe you could persuade M5Stack to do a version of hardware that suits. Looks like maybe they do already for $40 if you combine a base and LORA unit - https://m5stack.com/collections/m5-core https://m5stack.com/collections/m5-core https://m5stack.com/collections/m5-module https://m5stack.com/collections/m5-module

PVHSAlex 7y ago

15 year old High School sophomore noob here. We (crazily) are attempting to put up a CubeSat (shameless plug www.seakingspace.com). Using the Lora SX1268 433Mhz we tested the Semtech transceiver across the Catalina channel. 25+ Miles SF factors 7,9,11 at 125 BW. Worked great. We did a link budget and should work over 500KM line of sight no prob. The SX126X is the new improved version of the Lora chip. Im sure a verion with it will come out shortly.

punkgeek 7y ago
SUPER COOL. It sounds like you are using similar SFs to us. Rock on!
airbreather 7y ago
LoRaWAN® distance world record broken. 766 km (476 miles) using 25mW transmission power. After almost 2 years, the world record of 702 km (436 miles) has been broken.Aug 14, 2019 25mW, imagine what you could do with 1/2 a watt.

keiraarts 7y ago

Please get a newsletter up - would purchase this in a heartbeat.

punkgeek 7y ago
you can buy it now if you wanna guy a radio from aliexpress (not from us). see our website for info.

SamPatt 7y ago

This looks neat. How does this differ from disaster.radio? More portable? I ask because I really think these are important projects and I'm not sure which to contribute my time towards.

punkgeek 7y ago
We're working with those guys and might share the same protocol stack. Discussions underway. The difference is: disaster.radio is targeted as a "just in case emergency radio build on custom hardware, that joins a mesh with other folks who bought the same emergency radio." This is a $30 radio (with built in GPS+radio+CPU+battery+OLED screen) already available from a chinese mfg. Then you put our app on it and have a group navigator you can use with your friends while skiing or hiking, instead of buying a $100 closed source kickstarter (and it will run eight days on a charge)"

gardners 7y ago

Howdy, as the founder of the Serval Mesh adhoc networking protocols and hardware, what I would look for in a new radio is: 1. True packet radio mode, that doesn't hide the radioness of the link etc, but lets the programmer use it's strengths. 2. UART link, ideally using 3DR/RFD900 compatible connector (then we can include it directly in our existing systems, and so can others). 3. Field-flashable, but with robust protections on the boot loader, as it is not uncommon for a radio to be on the boot serial interface, on hardware that has only one serial port. 4. Support 434, 868 and 905-935MHz ISM bands. 5. Use advanced interference tolerant wave-forms, like Chirped Spread Spectrum or even something better. 6. Fully open chipset/firmware design, so that it can be truted. Anyway, poke me at paul@servalproject.org if you would like to talk further about it. Paul.

punkgeek 7y ago
Thanks for the feedback. I think this project is a little bit different, we are focusing for now on making a nice end-user friendly consumer product using hardware that is already shipping from various aliexpress vendors. our tag line is "An opensource hiking, pilot, skiing, Signal-App-extending GPS mesh communicator for $30" We are currently using RadioHead mesh library, but we might shift to a common implementation with the disaster radio geeks. btw: Back when I was writing Andropilot I also wrote a fair portion of the code that is in those RFD900 radios (or at least was, I haven't checked in a while). I'm super glad you are using them!
- th0ma5 7y ago
  Keep the hacking ability. Your large target demographic may not use or need it, but tinkerers will hype your product for free, at least in theory. See the RTL_SDR as an example, although it is a low cost DVB tuner.
  - punkgeek 7y ago
    oh yes - definitely want people to hack and add features (or use it as auto configuring pipes for other projects etc...). I'm just trying to say "at least for 1.0" we are trying to stay focused on this one primary thing. ;-)

masukomi 7y ago

The idea of these radio mesh network things is great. The reality is terrible because radio waves need line of sight unless you've got a repeater. This is completely impractical when hiking, or in a city filled with buildings. They end up with crazy short range between devices and you need an implausibly long string of them to get from a person off the grid to a mesh point on the grid. The only exception to this being someone high on a hill with no bumpy bits of other hills between them and whoever has the other mesh point that happens to be on-grid. Gotenna couldn't make this work with all their $$ because of the simple physics of radio waves. Yes they sell devices that technically do what they claim, they just fall flat on their faces when they encounter hills, or buildings... or anything that isn't flat. I think if you want to make something that actually works, you should drop the "consumer" and make having a ham radio license a requirement. Then use the GPS to find the closest public repeater. Their locations are pretty well mapped at this point. Use the most appropriate of the many ham radio digital packet systems for whatever wavelength you're broadcasting on and choose the appropriate part of the spectrum that is designated for digital packet use. Also be a good radio citizen and try other frequencies if the current one is in use. I understand that the ham license is pretty much a deal breaker for adoption BUT it's what's required to use the decent frequencies and access to repeaters. As this seems to be an open source kind of project and not a "hey lets sell bajillions" kinda thing, that seems like a plausible option.

sliken 7y ago
Dunno, I think one of the biggest weakness of various ham related technologies (and yes I have my general) is the assumption that everyone is online all the time. Trying to communicate with a few dozen people is very inefficient with amateur radio in general. It's usually voice, usually assumes everyone is doing nothing but listening, is listening continuously and has perfect reception. God forbid someone is driving, hiking aggressive terrain, or a group of 10 people is online only 60% of the time each. Most of the cheap ham stuff assumes a perfect repeater already to do the heavy lifting, which is nice when you have it, but very frustrating when you don't. I do wish that ham or consumer devices supported digital modes, peer to peer, store and forward, push, pull, query, etc. Js8call supports this, so you can do things like ask when someone was last seen, leave messages on 3rd parties, ask 3rd parties to forward, etc. So even if each radio is online part of the time, and parties that want to talk can not directly hear each other things work just fine. It's amazing to even think about, communicating several magnitudes below the noise floor, power levels so low that hams are proud when they get less than 1 watt per 1000 miles! Imagine standing on the west cost of the USA, shining a 5 watt flashlight at the sky, having it bounce off the sky, to land, and again into the sky, and again to the last to someone 1000s of miles away... and they can decode your signal. Amazing stuff. I do wonder what the smallest package you could fit a 1 watt bluetooth connected HF radio in to enable any phone to talk js8call.

Alex_P13 7y ago

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numlock86 7y ago

What's the reasoning behind the $30? Seems pretty high considering the hardware platform.

Acinyx 7y ago
He didn't make the hardware, the higher end board with GPS, the TTGO TBEAM is about this expensive if you also add a oled screen.

Uhrheber 7y ago

I can see why you're using these boards, but the ESP32 is an incredibly power hungry device. For battery/solar power it's not the best choice. For devices in the field I'd use one of the many available low power ARM controllers.

punkgeek 7y ago
we are careful to keep the esp clock-gated almost all the time (esp calls this light-sleep), in that mode the power draw of the ESP is on 1.5mA. When the radio (or button press) receives a packet it wakes the main CPU, which then services everything (turning on bluetooth as needed) and then goes back to sleep. If you are curious for more details we have a power consumptions spreadsheet in our docs.

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

I’m interested, but we’ll see how it goes. This is a non-trivial endeavor. I’ve been trying to write an open-source Apple driver for goTenna units, and have been unable to get them to help me out by providing their BLE spec. That’s a shame, because I write really nice SDKs. Even if my driver was open and free, it would provide significant brand reinforcement. Win-win. I believe that this tech is important, as it can provide service in disasters. I’m also big on open-source. But I cut my teeth on RF stuff, and know that it’s a real black art. Software can get complicated, but is child’s play, compared to RF tech. You have your work cut out for you.

punkgeek 7y ago
The current alpha works pretty well. (I'm sort of retired now, but my old job included writing software for these sorts of radios). If you'd like to play with this project we'd love your help (and we have a documented ble api). Here's an issue where various iOS types are ideating on possibly making an iOS app: https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32/issues/14 https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32/issues/14
- ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
  I'll probably look at it in a few days. I'm actually in the middle of creating a Web-based instruction series on writing Core Bluetooth SDKs for Apple platforms (not just iOS). Once I get that done, I may look at adapting this project: https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_GTDriver https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_GTDriver For it. It started as a goTenna project, but they never got around to helping me out, so I gave up on them, and made it an OBD driver. The infrastructure is still there for all kinds of stuff, so I could probably do something. BTW: If that works out, it would be an SDK that would afford ALL Apple platforms; including Watch and TV.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
  Just FYI. I ordered a couple of units, and will work on a native Swift SDK for the project, once I get them (AliExpress said "20-40 days"). In the meantime, I have my work cut out for me.

maufl 7y ago

This is awesome! It looks like it could do several things for which I wanted to have a device. Offline GPS tracker with very long run time for hiking. I'd like up to one month run time. On the other hand I only need low time resolution, one waypoint each minute. It also does not need to send the location anywhere, storing it local is fine. Offline/Online GPS tracker for paragliding. Battery for one day, but also high resolution tracking, about one waypoint per second. Long range communication extender for my mobile phone that does not require infrastructure like base stations. (For the prepper in me)

OnACoffeeBreak 7y ago
This Garmin device in Expedition mode might work for you. It seems to have configurable GPS logging and inReach satellite coms. https://forums.garmin.com/outdoor-recreation/inreach/f/gpsmap-66i/214719/gpsmap-66i-battery-life-i-m-on-the-fence https://forums.garmin.com/outdoor-recreation/inreach/f/gpsma...
punkgeek 7y ago
current battery life is about 3 days and will soon be eight days. See our power calculations spreadsheet, but with with scheduled broadcast intervals (because we have GPS time) it is fairly feasible to reach 30 days between charging. I'm also a (retired, but formerly very active) paraglider and that was a big motivator for me.

jokoon 7y ago

It's not a new idea, but it's really a cool project, it just seems difficult to democratize. Problem #1: if users need a custom antenna, it's already a barrier. /me dreams about the IEEE people designing standards that would enable smartphones to use mesh networking... I guess a tiny antenna that can be attached to a smartphone could also make it viable. If the antenna is not bigger than the phone, it would certainly be marketed. In my view, mesh radio could possibly compete with traditional ISPs, for certain uses, so this kind of tech might not be funded for obvious reasons.

anilakar 7y ago

How will you make sure your customers will be in compliance when operating the device? GoTenna used to have a nice photo gallery of people breaking the law, i.e. using their earlier MURS-band mesh devices abroad.

timini 7y ago

Has anyone here discussed the avalanche rescue as a use case?

uitwear2 7y ago

Would be great to have LoraWan redundancy, say with the things network, if in range. From my experience, 8 days battery life with TTGO-beam is unrealistic, unless sleeping for most of the time, or with some hardware modifications. Great project, I will test it out!

fh973 7y ago

This is very similar to FLARM devices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLARM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLARM) for ultralights, gliders, etc. This is already broadly deployed (at least in Europe). You could check for any lessons learned there. I think you can discount any flight users, because they would like to be seen too by other airplanes.

efesak 7y ago
FLARM is very bad example especialy for DIY community. They have proprietary chips, firmware and are running non opensourced protocol. Also they are actively trying to prevent reverse engineering with cryptography and killing old/diy devices with protocol timebombs...
- fh973 7y ago
  Yes, I am also not enthusiastic about the crypto part, but then if it prevents people from spoofing signals, it is probably a good decision. The wikipedia suggests they use standard hardware components?

ruslan 7y ago

Before you proceed any further, please consider aquiring our patent: RU2559714. More details on our communication device: http://www.videoptt.com/ http://www.videoptt.com/

Hitton 7y ago
They don't try to transmit video so stop your patent trolling.

mikehollinger 7y ago

Go have a look at https://www.project-owl.com/ https://www.project-owl.com/ when you have a moment. They’re tackling similar problems but from a different angle. Doesn’t mean there isn’t room for both!

wwn_se 7y ago

This looks promising. Some form of Repeater/Server or similar feature would be great. A small webserver that the phone can use as a backbone would be really useful. I might even try to help with developing one.

reisr3 7y ago

This is awesome, thanks for sharing! I'm considering using this for a project where I need to measure distance between two nodes. Couple questions: 1. You mention "location and distance" between member nodes. I assume this is based on the LORA RSSI? How precise is the reading? 2. Do you support the "TTGO LORA32"? Your Github Readme mentions it, but Pages does not. 3. Will the TTGO LORA32 and Heltec LoRa 32 measure distance without being connected to a phone?

alfla 7y ago
If the nodes have GPS it's fairly straightforward to calculate distance and bearing.
- reisr3 7y ago
  Right, and accuracy of ~9m makes sense for this application. The smaller supported ESP32's, however, don't have onboard GPS. Does it use RSSI or need to be paired with a phone? Not that it's really relevant here, but I'm wondering if the LORA RSSI can be used to determine distance inside 9m.

ruslan 7y ago

I'm just curious why my comment regarding patent was deleted ? Yes we developed a device that implements this same idea of sharing GPS data over mesh (868 ISM) network and patented it in 2014. The patent is still valid and supported. If someone is interested in further development of this idea, please contact me, we would be happy to sell this patent along with schematics and source codes for fair price.

londons_explore 7y ago
Raising awareness that something is patented on a public forum isn't considered polite. Knowledge of something being patented changes potential damages to punitive damages, making potential lawsuit costs 3x. Hence, nearly all tech industries prevent discussion of patent specifics outside forums designed for patent discussion. Otherwise anyone who reads this page is increasing their liability 3x, which isn't what HN wants to inflict on its users.
luma 7y ago
Your post said nothing about the patent itself, and simply stated that this open source project should be paying you. It's not exactly the best approach on a site like this. How about outlining the specific patent claims you feel are being violated here, along with links to the patents in question? That approach would feel a lot more helpful and a lot less like a shakedown. If you've somehow managed to get a patent on sending GPS coords over LoRa I think a lot of people in this space are going to be interested in that. Nearly every LoRa application in the field is going to find themselves in violation.
- ruslan 7y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I'm not a patent troll, neither I want to sue anyone - that is against my attutude (I consider myself an old time hacker rooting from late 80s :)). I'm just a co-developer and co-holder of the patent for a device that does, among other things, exactly what topic starter described. We began developing it back in 2011 and proceeded for several years, we had been spending our free time and "pocket" money on it. In case you are interested it took us to route and assemble 22 versions of PCB prototype of the main board and 5 prototypes of a radio. We even exhibited it at one of the electronics show in Moscow. As we failed to find sufficient investment to push it to the market, we decided to freeze the project in 2015. In my initial comment that was silently and shamefully deleted, I proposed to aquire our patent, that's what might have any value today, as schematics and hardware are all outdated. As mentioned above, discussing patent details on public is not any good idea, that is why I simply pointed that I can be contacted on these matters. I understand that hackers are strictly opposed to any sort of patents or copyright. But it is not avoidable topic once you are into business of settling or growing your own company (or a startup). And this is a startup place, isn't it ?

EGreg 7y ago

We have (local ad hoc social networking) software that would be very useful to run on your mesh networks. What’s the best way to contact you?

punkgeek 7y ago
sure! either chat on our gitter chat (link at www.meshtastic.org) or send me an email at kevinh@geeksville.com.

deedubaya 7y ago

Very cool. There is a general fear in the backcountry Skiing community that any RF devices might impede or negatively impact the use of search and recovery beacons to locate buried partners in the event of an avalanche. Any documentation/speculation on any potential interference?

bradstewart 7y ago
I dabble in both backcountry and skiing and wireless devices, but I'm not an expert on either. My take on this: these devices should be safe to carry provided the hardware is verified to not produce spurious harmonics (via FCC certification or other means). The 900Mhz band used (in the US) by these radios will not interfere with 457KHz signals used by beacons. I wouldn't carry it in the same pocket as my beacon, but I would use this device--definitely excited to watch the project's progress.

dlumpkin 7y ago

This is a great idea, especially for tracking kids. I'd love to leave one of these in my kids backpack and know where they were without depending on a cellular-device/service-plan/charging/etc

vkaku 7y ago

Make the mesh affordable, keep making the drivers and interfaces clean and reasonably easy to maintain. In mass adoption, you want to keep the price right - so have a bulk pricing upfront. Also, keep one access protocol you can access from a phone / PC / most popular devices. You're doing everything right. Try to get one great customer who can benefit from this today.

wingworks 7y ago

Sounds promising, but as someone who tramps a decent amount, I love as much range as possible without needing a sat phone. I've got 2 gotenna, and they're not so great, very short range. Maybe 1km in hilly areas.

wildylion 7y ago

You can try to contact those Russian guys at http://stratonautica.ru/ http://stratonautica.ru/. They were making a project __exactly__ like this, with LoRa (with modifications?) but for location tracking. And if anybody is interested, I'm actively trying to cook up a neat solution with DMR radios - it just works better than the LoRa ones so far :). Into amateur radio, Digital voice, DMR, SAR, Location tracking and really looking up to https://www.sartrack.co.nz/ https://www.sartrack.co.nz/.

wildylion 7y ago
Also, am Russian and https://lizaalert.org https://lizaalert.org volunteer. Would be happy to see you on the bands if you've got a call, come over to TG 250661 GMT+3, daytime. 73s.