10 ms·

Meshtastic is an encrypted communications platform for the Lora RF protocol

249 points by buescher 4y ago

olah_1 4y ago
Another similar project: https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/
- RF_Savage 4y ago
  Meshtastic seems to be the most widespread one so far. And with the best hardware support. Reticulum looks interesting, but what does it bring to the table compared to previous efforts?
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    Having looked at things like this before (including Meshtastic) the thing that stuck out to me about Reticulum is that it’s carrier-agnostic. LoRa is cool, but being able to extend the network over arbitrary channels sounds very appealing.
    - rcoder 4y ago
      Reticulum also needs a general-purpose computer -- RPi, laptop, etc. -- that can run the Python daemon that actually handles network traffic. Meshtastic doesn't use or provide a TCP/IP stack (aside from a limited TUN interface wrapper which is really more of a proof-of-concept) but any device that can connect to a node using WiFi, BLE, or USB serial can use the network.
      - ryukafalz 4y ago
        Yeah, that does seem to be the main downside from what I can tell. Although Meshtastic devices seem to generally require a companion device to use most of their functionality, so I wonder how much that matters at this stage. I definitely would like a small stand-alone communicator type device at some point though, and yes, that’s probably more feasible with Meshtastic at this point. (Though there are Feather boards that can run Linux too which I’ve thought about playing around with.)
    - RF_Savage 4y ago
      But doesn't carrier agnostic in this context mean that it is very hard to coordinate with people to have compatible hardware? A nice compatible routing protocol does not help when people have a mix of LoRa, commodity 2.4GHz and 5GHz wifi as the physical layer. And then add in more esoteric stuff like 3.6GHz CBRS, 433MHz NPR-70, 900MHz Ubiquiti radios or new 802.11ah sub-1GHz radios.
      - ryukafalz 4y ago
        Maybe, but if you want to connect networks between two nearby towns for example, it’d be nice to be able to run that off commodity hardware that’s a bit higher-bandwidth than what you’ll get on LoRa. And realistically I suspect that people using it for the same sort of use cases they’d use Meshtastic for will be using the same LILYGO (and similar) hardware.
  - olah_1 4y ago
    answer from the Reticulum creator: “My knowlegde about Meshtastic is a bit limited, so I might get some details wrong, but from what I understand, Meshtastic is more or less an application. It is focused on carrying out a single task well, in a way that is easy to understand and deploy, but that also means that it will not really do anything else than that task, and stop working well if you push it close to, or outside, its intended operational domain. Reticulum itself is a general purpose communications stack. It will handle any sort of digital communication for you, from sending a single data packet to sending messages or streaming a video call, to serving a library of all human knowledge. But it will not do so itself. Someone will have to write the applications that utilise Reticulum to do those tasks. This also means that Reticulum, in itself, will not allow anyone to have a chat with someone else. You need an application using Reticulum for that, and a Reticulum network. Right now, only a handful of programs and applications exist that use Reticulum. One of those systems is LXMF, a distributed messaging protocol that enables direct (and offline) messaging between users and machines. There is currently several LXMF clients available that people can use on mobile devices and computers. This is similar to Meshtastic, in that they both serve the same end-goal, of sending messages between users. I don't know how open or interoperable the Meshtastic protocol is, but I do know that LXMF is very open and easy to integrate in other system, and messages passed with LXMF can be transported over any number of mediums, such as LoRa, WiFi, packet radio or over the Inernet. And you can mix and match the mediums as you please. This is possible since the messaging system is built on top of Reticulum (a general purpose networking stack), and it then gains all the capabilities of it (such as efficient multihop routing, global addressing, strong encryption, good privacy and so on). I hope this clarifies it a bit. If not please ask away and I will try to answer as best I can!“ https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/77#discussioncomment-3109349 https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/77#discus...
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Over the years I've had students doing "people net" style meshing, BATMAN, opportunistic routing, stuff for warzones or emergency coms for disaster areas. We learned a great place to test this is festivals. Lots of endpoint mobility. New nodes coming in and out of the network. Terrible 4/4G cell coverage, so few alternatives. Dead batteries. Shadow zones. Fairly chilled out delivery time constraints. Everything you need to tweak your protocols. I hope someone into playing with this will set up a larger scale experiment at Glastonbury, Burning Man or another big music festival.
- livueta 4y ago
  Burning Man is one of the the primary usecases of one of the core devs, so yeah, it should definitely get some good exercise in that kind of context. Another acquaintance is a PAX admin and looking into it for similar reasons.
  - bigiain 4y ago
    I've not been following along too closely for the last couple of years (not a lot of need for or opportunity to use it in Covid lockdown times), but the original lead dev's most memorable (for me) main use case was for paragliding. Being able to see where your friends are (and who's in good lift) as a group of paragliders would be very useful. Having a reliable long-is range way of letting your friends know where you landed out would obviously be super useful as well.
- c7h 4y ago
  We have tested it successfully with 4 nodes last week at the Fusion Festival in Germany - one of those where you have to battle constant cellular network outages - and were surprised to randomly see fellow meshtastic users extending the mesh network. It was one of those "open source technology is amazing" moments :D.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    This comment will go down in history. Super neat stuff.
angst_ridden 4y ago
Around October 2020, there was a group of people putting up battery powered LoRa repeater nodes in the hills around Los Angeles. I had a few LilyGo TTGO units, one with DisasterRadio and one with Meshtastic installed. I could get occasional packets through to one of the nodes that was about 6 miles away (line-of-sight). My conclusion was that for a city, a much higher transceiver density would be needed if you wanted viable communications. It's not outside the realm of possibility. The units themselves are less than $20/each in bulk, and could be powered with a $5 solar panel/battery rig. Placement of the units would be key. I saw some Hong Kong activists online post designs for "throwable" battery-powered units. The idea there was to toss out dozens of them during events where non-internet mesh communications would be needed. Seems like an interesting use case, although jamming and the end points (e.g., burner phones with WiFi->LoRa or Bluetooth->LoRa) are still the weak points in a scheme like that.
- delabay 4y ago
  Check out helium network. Crazy LoRaWAN density in LA.
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
I tried it some time ago, and the only way to communicate was to join a channel with someone you already knew (so basically it needed two(+) people to synchronize first in person or over some other channel, and then chat via meshtastic). Is there something that supports a "public" chatroom? Something that would allow you to set up a node on a window in a large city, become a point in a mesh and be able to join a chatroom with all the other people (that you don't know yet) and chat there? I don't personally know anyone else who'd use this over some "normal" chat platform, but live in a building high enough to be able to set a possibly usable meshpoint to connect with other enthousiasts and chat about random stuff there.
- livueta 4y ago
  The firmware has a 'default' channel where the psk is well-known: https://meshtastic.org/docs/settings/channel https://meshtastic.org/docs/settings/channel > Selecting a default or any of the simple values from the following table will use publicly known encryption keys. They're shipped with Meshtastic source code and thus, anyone can listen to messages encrypted by them. They're great for testing and public channels. In $west_coast_city I've gotten a fair amount of random pings on default settings. Other projects (using other base technologies) like https://www.arednmesh.org/ https://www.arednmesh.org/ are more focused on joining an already-existing network than making your own.
goodpoint 4y ago
It's a pity that LoRa is all proprietary and patented. An open alternative would provide more opportunities for experimenting. EDIT: there are alternatives like HaLow and DASH7 on paper but nothing you can buy (for 4 euro like LoRa)
- wmf 4y ago
  Maybe HaLow is more open.
- edrxty 4y ago
  M17 is possibly what you're looking for? Not specifically mesh but could be used similarly or extended. It's a a protocol that provides data and digital voice transmissions and works (with some modification) on a few existing commercial grade handheld radios running OpenRTX open source firmware. The only thing we need is a radio that has a Bluetooth module.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  I sometimes think about buying one of those LoRa arduino shields for some experiments. What exactly is proprietary in these?
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    The chipset, the modulation, the protocol itself, it's all proprietary and patented.
- pabs3 4y ago
  Range is lower for those though I thought.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
This project has been going on for a while. I heard about it (here), a couple of years ago. I think the main reason that I didn't get involved, was because there's quite a bit of "some assembly required" with the project. I don't really have a problem with that, but I wasn't really up to setting up a tech bench, all over, again. I was trying to work with a proprietary system, and they were quite uncooperative. Once I have the wraps on the project I'm doing now, I may see what I can do.
- livueta 4y ago
  You're correct that if you buy the most popular board for it (LilyGO T-Beam) from the source, you need to do some light soldering to get the screen on, and need to figure out a case on your own. That said, there's now an ecosystem of people on Etsy and other places who'll sell you a pre-soldered board in a nice printed case, e.g. everything under https://www.etsy.com/shop/QuantumShadow3D https://www.etsy.com/shop/QuantumShadow3D. Maybe worth considering if you just want to kick the tires without literally getting your hands dirty.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    Thanks! My dance card is a bit full, now, but this is the kind of stuff that makes my heart warm. I've been messing with hardware forever (my current project is all software). Is that the main guy behind Meshtastic? I'd probably just get a couple of the prebuilt radios, but not until it was time for me to start working on the project.
    - livueta 4y ago
      > Is that the main guy behind Meshtastic? AIUI he's not affiliated with the project, just makes good cases. If your interest is in financially supporting the project, there's stickers (https://meshtastic.discourse.group/t/limited-run-meshtastic-stickers/6092 https://meshtastic.discourse.group/t/limited-run-meshtastic-...) and donations (https://opencollective.com/meshtastic https://opencollective.com/meshtastic). I think LilyGO said something about donating a portion of sales of devices pre-flashed with Meshtastic to the project but I haven't kept up with that thread.
thcipriani 4y ago
I bought a couple of these from aliexpress fully assembled[0] (along with some massive terrifying batteries[1]). They're cool little devices. You can send messages via the app on your phone or by plugging them into your computer via USB. There's evidently also some wifi connectivity that I haven't experimented with at all. Message shows up in the chat room on the phone and on the other devices linked to the room. Planning to play with them for camping Soon™. [0]: < https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2255800992363816.html?spm=a2g0s.12269583.0.0.7e0c4665tDlSXd https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2255800992363816.html?spm=a2...> [1]: <https://www.18650batterystore.com/products/sanyo-ncr18650ga https://www.18650batterystore.com/products/sanyo-ncr18650ga>
nope96 4y ago
What kind of bandwidth and latency would you get using this? Say, in the suburbs of a major city, two people 5 miles apart... how many bytes/second? I'd love to see something like old school BBS systems take off again, an off the grid/off the internet network for hobbyists. According to https://meshtastic.discourse.group/t/data-bandwidth-and-latency/654 https://meshtastic.discourse.group/t/data-bandwidth-and-late... "But for the default very long range config it takes about 3 seconds to send 60ish bytes." Hmm, a bit slower than a 300 baud modem.
- AdamH12113 4y ago
  I'm not sure about Meshtastic, but in LoRaWAN, with the largest spreading factor (= maximum range) the maximum packet size is 11 bytes. And you get maybe one packet per second at most. Meshtastic is its own protocol and uses repeaters (and wider channels?), so I would expect them to do better, but not several orders of magnitude better. I worked on LoRaWAN systems a couple years ago, and from what I found the biggest determinant of performance was what frequency band you're in. US915 has a 400ms dwell time limit for single transmissions, while EU868 has a 1% duty cycle limit. LoRa was designed for sending small amounts of data infrequently -- that's the "low-power" in LPWAN. Where I worked we were pushing it to the limits to get a couple hundred bytes per second at close range. LoRa does have some nice properties and I'm glad to see people using it outside of LoRaWAN, which is somewhat bulky for point-to-point communication.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - rcoder 4y ago
    Meshtastic can carry a bit more data per packet -- 200-ish bytes, IIRC -- but the same duty cycle/dwell time constraints apply. The routing model also makes it hard to add more than a few dozen nodes to a mesh. For small groups over wide distances that's absolutely fine, but it isn't a great option if you want to connect large numbers of _people_, unless said people are clustered around a few devices sharing WiFi or BLE connection time. (Meshtastic also doesn't really support this use case b/c of a "one device == one user/identity/mailbox" model, but that's an application-level choice, not something imposed by the underlying network.)
jokowueu 4y ago
I've joined their discord a while back But few time a year I go online and just try to find a simple Lora device with good range a qwerty keyboard and a simple OS It still doesn't exist . Maybe in a few years
- squarefoot 4y ago
  The Pinephone has a LoRa capable add-on case, but the software still is in its infancy: https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-pinephone-pro-pindio-lora-add-on-case/ https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-pinephone-pro-pindio-lo... The Pocket Popcorn Computer might be closer to what you are looking for, if and when it will be ready for purchase. https://pocket.popcorncomputer.com/ https://pocket.popcorncomputer.com/
- noman-land 4y ago
  You still can't get this on one package but the closest I've come so far is using a LoRa capable feather board [0] and a keyboard feathering [1]. This gets you much of the way there. [0] https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-feather/lora-radio-feathers https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-feather/lora-radio-feath... [1] https://www.solder.party/docs/keyboard-featherwing/ https://www.solder.party/docs/keyboard-featherwing/
- itintheory 4y ago
  There's a LoRa model of the Popcorn Pocket P.C. which will have a physical keyboard and run Linux, however they're a couple years behind manufacturing schedule so it's a little doubtful if it'll ever actually be for sale.
foobarbecue 4y ago
What's a typical range between nodes for systems like this? Just looking for order of magnitude -- are we talking 1km? 10km?
- edrxty 4y ago
  I work with similar systems a lot, given the modulation and power output, 1-10km would be a reasonable range band, 10km being line of sight under real world conditions, 1km being light urban propagation. It could theoretically be much worse in a dense urban environment with a high noise floor but I think you can safely put it around or slightly better than the performance of those blister pack FRS walkie talkies. For comparison, my APRS mobilinkd modem attached to a 5 Watt handheld 144mhz radio will routinely do an order of magnitude better and the same modem on my 50w mobile car radio will approach two orders (double the base range plus additional antenna efficiencies).
sharmin123 4y ago
metadaemon 4y ago
Is there any concern with encrypted packets sent over radio and the FCC?
- sitzkrieg 4y ago
  this is ISM, so no
  - metadaemon 4y ago
    Yeah I guess if you're on 915MHz in the US you're good. 868, not so much.
- buescher 4y ago
  Not if you're operating within part 15 limits. But if you're operating your Lora radio as an amateur radio operator, then yes.
jcbcn 4y ago
I've been thinking about this idea recently and finally I've stumbled across a real world implementation!
londons_explore 4y ago
Remember that if anyone manages to get any kind of mesh network working that regular users can use, they will get immediate and very hard pushback from mobile network providers. People will stop spending $1000/year to have a cell connection if they can browse the web and message friends using your mesh network for free.
- z3c0 4y ago
  That's only if they make it past major ISPs, who have all decided that acting as a mesh bridge is against their terms of service.
  - derbOac 4y ago
    Yet another reason for competition in the form of municipal ISPs.
- buescher 4y ago
  My prediction is that no one will ever get the "join us now and share the bandwidth" model of mesh networking to work for any reasonable definition of "work", for both technical and social/political/human-being reasons. No industry conspiracy will be necessary.
  - chrononaut 4y ago
    Doesn't this count? https://www.nycmesh.net/ https://www.nycmesh.net/
    - buescher 4y ago
      Good luck with that.
- supertrope 4y ago
  Mesh networks will always perform poorly. Each wireless hop cuts throughout in half. People don’t want their device’s battery charge and timeslots used to relay other people’s traffic. To simulate the slowness, use Tor full time.
nullc 4y ago
Does meshtastic still have the problem that if there are too many nearby devices they will "capture" messages and use up all their hop count before they make it far?
ComputerCat 4y ago
Not going to lie, this is pretty neat!
sweis 4y ago
Is this using unauthenticated AES-CTR mode? https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/blob/04478081c6252e80bb602dcf7d233fdddb1c9651/src/nrf52/aes-256/tiny-aes.cpp#L200 https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/blob/0447808... https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/blob/04478081c6252e80bb602dcf7d233fdddb1c9651/src/nrf52/NRF52CryptoEngine.cpp#L24 https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/blob/0447808... https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/blob/285413c68cb6aeb6b102ab24084d7881b9d2ae2a/src/portduino/CrossPlatformCryptoEngine.cpp#L37 https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/blob/285413c...
walterbell 4y ago
Are duty cycles voluntary with Meshtastic, as with LoRaWAN? https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/t/lorawan-duty-cycle-abuse/5945 https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/t/lorawan-duty-cycle-...
iseanstevens 4y ago
This is a great project. Still work in progress but so much better than expensive commercial closed source products that are similar
ENadyr 4y ago
I was hacking on this back in 2019 but never finished it, glad this open source project came about and looking forward to trying it out on my next hike! Found a great case for the modules on here too https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5200457 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5200457 !
brooksbp 4y ago
Why isn't the LoRa PHY spec open source?

249 points by buescher 4y ago

olah_1 4y ago

Another similar project: https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/

RF_Savage 4y ago
Meshtastic seems to be the most widespread one so far. And with the best hardware support. Reticulum looks interesting, but what does it bring to the table compared to previous efforts?
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  Having looked at things like this before (including Meshtastic) the thing that stuck out to me about Reticulum is that it’s carrier-agnostic. LoRa is cool, but being able to extend the network over arbitrary channels sounds very appealing.
  - rcoder 4y ago
    Reticulum also needs a general-purpose computer -- RPi, laptop, etc. -- that can run the Python daemon that actually handles network traffic. Meshtastic doesn't use or provide a TCP/IP stack (aside from a limited TUN interface wrapper which is really more of a proof-of-concept) but any device that can connect to a node using WiFi, BLE, or USB serial can use the network.
    - ryukafalz 4y ago
      Yeah, that does seem to be the main downside from what I can tell. Although Meshtastic devices seem to generally require a companion device to use most of their functionality, so I wonder how much that matters at this stage. I definitely would like a small stand-alone communicator type device at some point though, and yes, that’s probably more feasible with Meshtastic at this point. (Though there are Feather boards that can run Linux too which I’ve thought about playing around with.)
  - RF_Savage 4y ago
    But doesn't carrier agnostic in this context mean that it is very hard to coordinate with people to have compatible hardware? A nice compatible routing protocol does not help when people have a mix of LoRa, commodity 2.4GHz and 5GHz wifi as the physical layer. And then add in more esoteric stuff like 3.6GHz CBRS, 433MHz NPR-70, 900MHz Ubiquiti radios or new 802.11ah sub-1GHz radios.
    - ryukafalz 4y ago
      Maybe, but if you want to connect networks between two nearby towns for example, it’d be nice to be able to run that off commodity hardware that’s a bit higher-bandwidth than what you’ll get on LoRa. And realistically I suspect that people using it for the same sort of use cases they’d use Meshtastic for will be using the same LILYGO (and similar) hardware.
- olah_1 4y ago
  answer from the Reticulum creator: “My knowlegde about Meshtastic is a bit limited, so I might get some details wrong, but from what I understand, Meshtastic is more or less an application. It is focused on carrying out a single task well, in a way that is easy to understand and deploy, but that also means that it will not really do anything else than that task, and stop working well if you push it close to, or outside, its intended operational domain. Reticulum itself is a general purpose communications stack. It will handle any sort of digital communication for you, from sending a single data packet to sending messages or streaming a video call, to serving a library of all human knowledge. But it will not do so itself. Someone will have to write the applications that utilise Reticulum to do those tasks. This also means that Reticulum, in itself, will not allow anyone to have a chat with someone else. You need an application using Reticulum for that, and a Reticulum network. Right now, only a handful of programs and applications exist that use Reticulum. One of those systems is LXMF, a distributed messaging protocol that enables direct (and offline) messaging between users and machines. There is currently several LXMF clients available that people can use on mobile devices and computers. This is similar to Meshtastic, in that they both serve the same end-goal, of sending messages between users. I don't know how open or interoperable the Meshtastic protocol is, but I do know that LXMF is very open and easy to integrate in other system, and messages passed with LXMF can be transported over any number of mediums, such as LoRa, WiFi, packet radio or over the Inernet. And you can mix and match the mediums as you please. This is possible since the messaging system is built on top of Reticulum (a general purpose networking stack), and it then gains all the capabilities of it (such as efficient multihop routing, global addressing, strong encryption, good privacy and so on). I hope this clarifies it a bit. If not please ask away and I will try to answer as best I can!“ https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/77#discussioncomment-3109349 https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/77#discus...

nonrandomstring 4y ago

Over the years I've had students doing "people net" style meshing, BATMAN, opportunistic routing, stuff for warzones or emergency coms for disaster areas. We learned a great place to test this is festivals. Lots of endpoint mobility. New nodes coming in and out of the network. Terrible 4/4G cell coverage, so few alternatives. Dead batteries. Shadow zones. Fairly chilled out delivery time constraints. Everything you need to tweak your protocols. I hope someone into playing with this will set up a larger scale experiment at Glastonbury, Burning Man or another big music festival.

livueta 4y ago
Burning Man is one of the the primary usecases of one of the core devs, so yeah, it should definitely get some good exercise in that kind of context. Another acquaintance is a PAX admin and looking into it for similar reasons.
- bigiain 4y ago
  I've not been following along too closely for the last couple of years (not a lot of need for or opportunity to use it in Covid lockdown times), but the original lead dev's most memorable (for me) main use case was for paragliding. Being able to see where your friends are (and who's in good lift) as a group of paragliders would be very useful. Having a reliable long-is range way of letting your friends know where you landed out would obviously be super useful as well.
c7h 4y ago
We have tested it successfully with 4 nodes last week at the Fusion Festival in Germany - one of those where you have to battle constant cellular network outages - and were surprised to randomly see fellow meshtastic users extending the mesh network. It was one of those "open source technology is amazing" moments :D.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  This comment will go down in history. Super neat stuff.

angst_ridden 4y ago

Around October 2020, there was a group of people putting up battery powered LoRa repeater nodes in the hills around Los Angeles. I had a few LilyGo TTGO units, one with DisasterRadio and one with Meshtastic installed. I could get occasional packets through to one of the nodes that was about 6 miles away (line-of-sight). My conclusion was that for a city, a much higher transceiver density would be needed if you wanted viable communications. It's not outside the realm of possibility. The units themselves are less than $20/each in bulk, and could be powered with a $5 solar panel/battery rig. Placement of the units would be key. I saw some Hong Kong activists online post designs for "throwable" battery-powered units. The idea there was to toss out dozens of them during events where non-internet mesh communications would be needed. Seems like an interesting use case, although jamming and the end points (e.g., burner phones with WiFi->LoRa or Bluetooth->LoRa) are still the weak points in a scheme like that.

delabay 4y ago
Check out helium network. Crazy LoRaWAN density in LA.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

I tried it some time ago, and the only way to communicate was to join a channel with someone you already knew (so basically it needed two(+) people to synchronize first in person or over some other channel, and then chat via meshtastic). Is there something that supports a "public" chatroom? Something that would allow you to set up a node on a window in a large city, become a point in a mesh and be able to join a chatroom with all the other people (that you don't know yet) and chat there? I don't personally know anyone else who'd use this over some "normal" chat platform, but live in a building high enough to be able to set a possibly usable meshpoint to connect with other enthousiasts and chat about random stuff there.

livueta 4y ago
The firmware has a 'default' channel where the psk is well-known: https://meshtastic.org/docs/settings/channel https://meshtastic.org/docs/settings/channel > Selecting a default or any of the simple values from the following table will use publicly known encryption keys. They're shipped with Meshtastic source code and thus, anyone can listen to messages encrypted by them. They're great for testing and public channels. In $west_coast_city I've gotten a fair amount of random pings on default settings. Other projects (using other base technologies) like https://www.arednmesh.org/ https://www.arednmesh.org/ are more focused on joining an already-existing network than making your own.

goodpoint 4y ago

It's a pity that LoRa is all proprietary and patented. An open alternative would provide more opportunities for experimenting. EDIT: there are alternatives like HaLow and DASH7 on paper but nothing you can buy (for 4 euro like LoRa)

wmf 4y ago
Maybe HaLow is more open.
edrxty 4y ago
M17 is possibly what you're looking for? Not specifically mesh but could be used similarly or extended. It's a a protocol that provides data and digital voice transmissions and works (with some modification) on a few existing commercial grade handheld radios running OpenRTX open source firmware. The only thing we need is a radio that has a Bluetooth module.
marcodiego 4y ago
I sometimes think about buying one of those LoRa arduino shields for some experiments. What exactly is proprietary in these?
- goodpoint 4y ago
  The chipset, the modulation, the protocol itself, it's all proprietary and patented.
pabs3 4y ago
Range is lower for those though I thought.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

This project has been going on for a while. I heard about it (here), a couple of years ago. I think the main reason that I didn't get involved, was because there's quite a bit of "some assembly required" with the project. I don't really have a problem with that, but I wasn't really up to setting up a tech bench, all over, again. I was trying to work with a proprietary system, and they were quite uncooperative. Once I have the wraps on the project I'm doing now, I may see what I can do.

livueta 4y ago
You're correct that if you buy the most popular board for it (LilyGO T-Beam) from the source, you need to do some light soldering to get the screen on, and need to figure out a case on your own. That said, there's now an ecosystem of people on Etsy and other places who'll sell you a pre-soldered board in a nice printed case, e.g. everything under https://www.etsy.com/shop/QuantumShadow3D https://www.etsy.com/shop/QuantumShadow3D. Maybe worth considering if you just want to kick the tires without literally getting your hands dirty.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  Thanks! My dance card is a bit full, now, but this is the kind of stuff that makes my heart warm. I've been messing with hardware forever (my current project is all software). Is that the main guy behind Meshtastic? I'd probably just get a couple of the prebuilt radios, but not until it was time for me to start working on the project.
  - livueta 4y ago
    > Is that the main guy behind Meshtastic? AIUI he's not affiliated with the project, just makes good cases. If your interest is in financially supporting the project, there's stickers (https://meshtastic.discourse.group/t/limited-run-meshtastic-stickers/6092 https://meshtastic.discourse.group/t/limited-run-meshtastic-...) and donations (https://opencollective.com/meshtastic https://opencollective.com/meshtastic). I think LilyGO said something about donating a portion of sales of devices pre-flashed with Meshtastic to the project but I haven't kept up with that thread.

thcipriani 4y ago

I bought a couple of these from aliexpress fully assembled[0] (along with some massive terrifying batteries[1]). They're cool little devices. You can send messages via the app on your phone or by plugging them into your computer via USB. There's evidently also some wifi connectivity that I haven't experimented with at all. Message shows up in the chat room on the phone and on the other devices linked to the room. Planning to play with them for camping Soon™. [0]: < https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2255800992363816.html?spm=a2g0s.12269583.0.0.7e0c4665tDlSXd https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2255800992363816.html?spm=a2...> [1]: <https://www.18650batterystore.com/products/sanyo-ncr18650ga https://www.18650batterystore.com/products/sanyo-ncr18650ga>

nope96 4y ago

What kind of bandwidth and latency would you get using this? Say, in the suburbs of a major city, two people 5 miles apart... how many bytes/second? I'd love to see something like old school BBS systems take off again, an off the grid/off the internet network for hobbyists. According to https://meshtastic.discourse.group/t/data-bandwidth-and-latency/654 https://meshtastic.discourse.group/t/data-bandwidth-and-late... "But for the default very long range config it takes about 3 seconds to send 60ish bytes." Hmm, a bit slower than a 300 baud modem.

AdamH12113 4y ago
I'm not sure about Meshtastic, but in LoRaWAN, with the largest spreading factor (= maximum range) the maximum packet size is 11 bytes. And you get maybe one packet per second at most. Meshtastic is its own protocol and uses repeaters (and wider channels?), so I would expect them to do better, but not several orders of magnitude better. I worked on LoRaWAN systems a couple years ago, and from what I found the biggest determinant of performance was what frequency band you're in. US915 has a 400ms dwell time limit for single transmissions, while EU868 has a 1% duty cycle limit. LoRa was designed for sending small amounts of data infrequently -- that's the "low-power" in LPWAN. Where I worked we were pushing it to the limits to get a couple hundred bytes per second at close range. LoRa does have some nice properties and I'm glad to see people using it outside of LoRaWAN, which is somewhat bulky for point-to-point communication.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rcoder 4y ago
  Meshtastic can carry a bit more data per packet -- 200-ish bytes, IIRC -- but the same duty cycle/dwell time constraints apply. The routing model also makes it hard to add more than a few dozen nodes to a mesh. For small groups over wide distances that's absolutely fine, but it isn't a great option if you want to connect large numbers of _people_, unless said people are clustered around a few devices sharing WiFi or BLE connection time. (Meshtastic also doesn't really support this use case b/c of a "one device == one user/identity/mailbox" model, but that's an application-level choice, not something imposed by the underlying network.)

jokowueu 4y ago

I've joined their discord a while back But few time a year I go online and just try to find a simple Lora device with good range a qwerty keyboard and a simple OS It still doesn't exist . Maybe in a few years

squarefoot 4y ago
The Pinephone has a LoRa capable add-on case, but the software still is in its infancy: https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-pinephone-pro-pindio-lora-add-on-case/ https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-pinephone-pro-pindio-lo... The Pocket Popcorn Computer might be closer to what you are looking for, if and when it will be ready for purchase. https://pocket.popcorncomputer.com/ https://pocket.popcorncomputer.com/
noman-land 4y ago
You still can't get this on one package but the closest I've come so far is using a LoRa capable feather board [0] and a keyboard feathering [1]. This gets you much of the way there. [0] https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-feather/lora-radio-feathers https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-feather/lora-radio-feath... [1] https://www.solder.party/docs/keyboard-featherwing/ https://www.solder.party/docs/keyboard-featherwing/
itintheory 4y ago
There's a LoRa model of the Popcorn Pocket P.C. which will have a physical keyboard and run Linux, however they're a couple years behind manufacturing schedule so it's a little doubtful if it'll ever actually be for sale.

foobarbecue 4y ago

What's a typical range between nodes for systems like this? Just looking for order of magnitude -- are we talking 1km? 10km?

edrxty 4y ago
I work with similar systems a lot, given the modulation and power output, 1-10km would be a reasonable range band, 10km being line of sight under real world conditions, 1km being light urban propagation. It could theoretically be much worse in a dense urban environment with a high noise floor but I think you can safely put it around or slightly better than the performance of those blister pack FRS walkie talkies. For comparison, my APRS mobilinkd modem attached to a 5 Watt handheld 144mhz radio will routinely do an order of magnitude better and the same modem on my 50w mobile car radio will approach two orders (double the base range plus additional antenna efficiencies).

sharmin123 4y ago

metadaemon 4y ago

Is there any concern with encrypted packets sent over radio and the FCC?

sitzkrieg 4y ago
this is ISM, so no
- metadaemon 4y ago
  Yeah I guess if you're on 915MHz in the US you're good. 868, not so much.
buescher 4y ago
Not if you're operating within part 15 limits. But if you're operating your Lora radio as an amateur radio operator, then yes.

jcbcn 4y ago

I've been thinking about this idea recently and finally I've stumbled across a real world implementation!

londons_explore 4y ago

Remember that if anyone manages to get any kind of mesh network working that regular users can use, they will get immediate and very hard pushback from mobile network providers. People will stop spending $1000/year to have a cell connection if they can browse the web and message friends using your mesh network for free.

z3c0 4y ago
That's only if they make it past major ISPs, who have all decided that acting as a mesh bridge is against their terms of service.
- derbOac 4y ago
  Yet another reason for competition in the form of municipal ISPs.
buescher 4y ago
My prediction is that no one will ever get the "join us now and share the bandwidth" model of mesh networking to work for any reasonable definition of "work", for both technical and social/political/human-being reasons. No industry conspiracy will be necessary.
- chrononaut 4y ago
  Doesn't this count? https://www.nycmesh.net/ https://www.nycmesh.net/
  - buescher 4y ago
    Good luck with that.
supertrope 4y ago
Mesh networks will always perform poorly. Each wireless hop cuts throughout in half. People don’t want their device’s battery charge and timeslots used to relay other people’s traffic. To simulate the slowness, use Tor full time.

nullc 4y ago

Does meshtastic still have the problem that if there are too many nearby devices they will "capture" messages and use up all their hop count before they make it far?

ComputerCat 4y ago

Not going to lie, this is pretty neat!

sweis 4y ago

Is this using unauthenticated AES-CTR mode? https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/blob/04478081c6252e80bb602dcf7d233fdddb1c9651/src/nrf52/aes-256/tiny-aes.cpp#L200 https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/blob/0447808... https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/blob/04478081c6252e80bb602dcf7d233fdddb1c9651/src/nrf52/NRF52CryptoEngine.cpp#L24 https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/blob/0447808... https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/blob/285413c68cb6aeb6b102ab24084d7881b9d2ae2a/src/portduino/CrossPlatformCryptoEngine.cpp#L37 https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/blob/285413c...

walterbell 4y ago

Are duty cycles voluntary with Meshtastic, as with LoRaWAN? https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/t/lorawan-duty-cycle-abuse/5945 https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/t/lorawan-duty-cycle-...

iseanstevens 4y ago

This is a great project. Still work in progress but so much better than expensive commercial closed source products that are similar

ENadyr 4y ago

I was hacking on this back in 2019 but never finished it, glad this open source project came about and looking forward to trying it out on my next hike! Found a great case for the modules on here too https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5200457 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5200457 !

brooksbp 4y ago

Why isn't the LoRa PHY spec open source?