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My First Meshtastic Network
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- russdill 10mo ago(The two amazon links for the antenna upgrade and pair of radios is swapped, if you're looking for the one, click the other)
- rickcarlino 10mo agoWhoops. Thanks I will fix that later today.
- spacebacon 10mo agoThe Meshtastic list of networks is nice, but it is missing several. For example, the lack of listings in North Carolina led me to find https://ncmesh.net/ https://ncmesh.net/.
- meshtastictm 10mo agoYay! Now you can enjoy the 8543 device roles Meshtastic has to offer, and see the static position and battery level eating away at airtime utilization. How exciting! Meshtastic is a bad protocol developed by toxic people in way over their heads. Beware of using their trademark! They’ll send you a cease and desist letter.
- xyx0826 10mo agoYou seemed to have made an account just for this reply. Care to explain the cynicism? I’m out of the loop with the toxicity.
- bb88 10mo agoI'm not OP, but there's a lot of criticism of meshtastic from people knowledgable about mesh networks. I also have been critical of meshtastic on this site. Here's an example of a good criticism: https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-0215 https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-0215 I have no experience with the community, but if they couldn't have been bothered with understanding AlohaNet from several decades previous, than maybe it's not surprising. I myself have been fairly critical of meshtastic, you can probably search for bb88 and meshtastic to find more criticisms. To save you some time, I live in a fairly populous city with a bunch of meshtastic nodes, and can't get a message accross from me to my friend who lives one hop away.
- wtallis 10mo agoIt's not clear to me which portions of that very long newsletter are responding specifically to Meshtastic, but it seems like the most relevant section starts by listing some challenges but offers nothing in the way of solutions except to digress into talking about a wildly different class of radio hardware (SDRs that can monitor many channels at once).
- bb88 10mo agoSo you mean other than these sections right? "Thought experiments about mesh networking" "Hard Lessons Learned -- What not to do" "Meshtastic Is Rediscovering Lessons (Already Learned) of Amateur Radio Data Networking" Instead of actually trying to understand the arguments these days, it's easier to inject noise into the argument, proclaiming it's too "hard to find" or "too hard to understand." Mesh networking is a hard topic. Expect to expend some brain cells to understand it. I'm not here to spoon feed you tech that was well understood 3 decades ago.
- wtallis 10mo agoHow about you make an actual argument here in this thread, instead of vaguely gesturing at an excessively long newsletter and claiming there's relevant substance in there somewhere? Or at least tell me if I've incorrectly interpreted the "Meshtastic Is Rediscovering Lessons (Already Learned) of Amateur Radio Data Networking" section as listing problems but no solutions aside from buying a radically different (more expensive and power-hungry) type of radio? Try making some specific suggestions for what Meshtastic is doing wrong that could be done differently. That way, we can tell whether your beef is with the Meshtastic software and protocol, or with their choice of LoRa radio hardware, or if you're just trying to preach about your ideal mesh network design with unstated assumptions about the priorities and constraints of such a network.
- elevation 10mo agoEven without toxicity, as a domain expert, I'm cynical about community experiments in this space in general. Hobbyist "mesh networking" communities readily adopt suboptimal modulation, frame specification, packet format, encoding, ineffective mesh arrangements, flood-prone routing mechanisms, poor reference hardware, and bloated user interfaces, while often ignoring basic practices like forward error correction, collision detection/multiplexing, trust mechanisms. Community solutions tend to be opinionated in the worst ways ("we assumed you'd use an arduino" or "here's a mandatory packet header field to indicate whether you're currently in a hot air balloon") and under-constrained in areas where opinion would be helpful "our client UI has 75 configurable options -- get one wrong and you won't be able to communicate." By the time there is a "community" it's too late to address these issues: network effects have already locked in the worst design decisions.
- u8080 10mo agoAlso Meshtastic codebase is the awful mess - one of the many examples when Arduinoslop became something bigger than quick prototype.
- the_gipsy 10mo agoIt's much easier to call some protocol "bad design", after the fact, than to develop something yourself.
- itomato 10mo agoAnd presumably rely on discord despite MQTT?
- hexo 10mo agoI've also found meshtastic to be totally unusable in practice. Tried it, really really hard. It barely worked in a city i live in. Did not work at all when i took the node for 500km ride. Bad protocol, yes, it is.
- bb88 10mo agoAre meshtastic nodes still spamming their battery status over the network? Have they figured out that flood routing is a terrible routing mechanism?
- 4ndrewl 10mo agoIs it imperfect in an unusuable way? Do you have links to alternatives?
- Anonbrit 10mo agoMeshcore is the obvious quick answer to alternatives to flood routing
- nubinetwork 10mo agoFunny thing for a meshtastic dev to say
- clumsysmurf 10mo agoI'm ignorant of mesh technologies, but can somebody explain to me why they are using MQTT in their stack? Topics and pub-sub over TCP doesn't sound like a mesh-y kind of thing. Does it work well in this context?
- wtallis 10mo agoThe mesh isn't doing MQTT or TCP. They're using MQTT to bridge between meshes, with mesh nodes that have an internet connection or are paired to a smartphone with an internet connection relaying mesh traffic with an MQTT server.
- the_gipsy 10mo agoMQTT is used for map reporting, and sometimes as a "fallback" or to connect distant meshes.
- hexo 10mo agoAlso very good way to instantly spend all your air time. Remember, legally you can only transmit at something like 10% of time. In some bands even less, afaik.
- wtallis 10mo ago> Remember, legally you can only transmit at something like 10% of time In Europe. See the duty cycle limits summarized at https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/lora/#region https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/lora/#region
- the_gipsy 10mo agoIt's best not to retransmit MQTT. Unless you want to set up some very specific link between two meshes, or just some private or non-default channel.
- laserb0y 10mo agoI've seen several bigger Meshtastic networks in Europe that suffer from a dramatic unreliability. Everything beyond 1 Hop is often unusable. The public chat room only sees fragments of discussions. This causes big frustration within the community. MT clients are just too chatty. That most Roles can act as a (delayed) Router was IMHO a bad design decision. Also that they blocked the term "Meshcore" on their Reddit Sub leaves a bad taste. Both projects share similar problems - they should cooperate instead of fight each other.
- the_gipsy 10mo agoBlocking a "rival" standard isn't necessarily petty censorship, it can also be spam control. I check the sub once in a while and I definitely do not want to see the same "but meshcore" whining over and over and over again.
- NoiseBert69 10mo agoHonestly .. MC is very successful in terms reliability doing it their way. Ignoring that will with full force doesn't make MT better. Hopefully MT catches up. Their GPLv3 license is much more attractive to me than the MC MIT.
- wtallis 10mo agoI think both the Meshcore and Meshtastic communities have a problem with people being passive aggressive instead of being direct and upfront about the different tradeoffs chosen by those projects, and their consequences for various use cases. Unless those attitudes improve, keeping the forums separated is unfortunately one of the more straightforward ways to avoid flamewars and repetitive, circular arguments. There are significant downsides to the changes Meshcore made to achieve more reliability in some use cases; it's absolutely not an all-around improvement that Meshtastic necessarily needs to "catch up" to, and downplaying or hiding the downsides doesn't help anyone. At the same time, Meshtastic proponents should be more honest about the scalability limitations of their approach.
- hedgeho 10mo agoReticulum (https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/) seems to have quite a community with global chatrooms and local communities (saw at least US, Germany, Italy), seems like a more scalable solution than meshtastic imo.
- tikiheadd 10mo agoUnfortunate recent news, Reticulum is kinda done (at least the main dev is). https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/1069 https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/1069
- hedgeho 10mo agoYeahh, just saw that today :( it's a shame
- 405nm 10mo agothere’s still quite a lot of chat in the element group, active github projects, the “official” stack hit v1.0.0 this summer, and it works. him stepping away might slow things a little but there’s already enough functional stuff and actively maintained nomadnet pages that i’m frankly surprised at how few people have heard of this project.
- aeblyve 10mo agoNth for MeshCore, which the Boston Mesh has found to be a much more scalable solution for building an emplaced mesh network with hundreds of clients: https://analyzer.letsmesh.net/map?lat=42.00963&long=-70.96396&zoom=7 https://analyzer.letsmesh.net/map?lat=42.00963&long=-70.9639... Separately: while it's cool to chat human-style over these networks, lately I've been thinking that the real value add is last-mile automations. Stuff that won't clog the network like remote-starting your car once or twice a day, and is normally built on top of LTE.
- jtbaker 10mo agoFrom what I understand, Meshcore doesn't support the IOT/sensor types of use cases that Meshtastic does, right?
- aeblyve 10mo agoIt has some functionality of this type (you can see in the overall map a small number of "sensor" nodes), but it's not super well fleshed out or documented ATM. What I think you can do for sure today is poll a sensor over the mesh, unlike the meshtastic way where you generally automatically broadcast telemetry.
- mikeytown2 10mo agoYou can run a full blown weather station on MeshCore with wind rain temperatures etc
- itsamario 10mo agoThats what helium and some iot manufacturers tried like Ring. A mesh that only routes out the least utilized egress node. This is also convenient for backpackers and campers to request help, or get alerts, with their exact location
- wolvoleo 10mo agoMeshtastic is actually good though. Helium is just another crypto pyramid scheme that pollutes the airwaves. The things network is a much better alternative from people that actually care about making a great network and not about getting rich fast.
- kingkawn 10mo agoI’ve done extensive mesh network testing in nyc and compared with notes from other big cities, and the number one thing you can do to dramatically improve mesh reliability is moving off of the default frequency. Staying on Longfast is fine, but find an alt freq and everything will suddenly work 10x better.
- therobots927 10mo agoIs encryption allowed over this network? I know it’s not allowed over HAM. Also is triangulation / message source identification possible?
- aposm 10mo agoYes, it is enabled by default (in fact this caused problems earlier on). Licensed hams (in the US) can increase transmit power (and theoretically use additional spectrum outside of ISM) but even the default "public" channel was encrypted with a known, publicized key. There was some debate whether this ran afoul of amateur radio rules against encryption, even if the key is known, since it cannot be disabled. I believe there was some progress in fixing this and allowing truly unencrypted channels for licensed operators, but I haven't checked back recently.
- xanderlewis 10mo agoHam isn't an acronym. Just saying!
- NoiseBert69 10mo agoOn ISM frequencies encryption is allowed. Triangulation will work as long as you transmit. But it will be difficult as LoRa works down to -145dBm which is an extremely weak signal.
- colanderman 10mo agoI am pretty sure (though have not vetted) that triangulation of LoRa is possible even at very low SNR. The trick is understanding LoRa's trick, which is simply to "skew" the signal across time (via chirps), modulo a window of the configured bandwidth around the center frequency. The key is that the skew rate is purely a function of the spreading factor, bandwidth, and IQ polarity (= pol × BW² / 2^SF), so there's a small-ish finite number of skew rates. So you can just modulate raw IQ data with carriers at each of these skew rates to find one which gives you a bunch of carrier waves that hop around discretely at about twice the symbol rate, looking like an FSK signal. You can then bin this at a factor of, say 2^(SF-2) to correlate the signal and raise it up above the noise floor, on which you can apply any standard triangulation technique. I'll try vetting this soon and reply to this post with results.
- VikingCoder 10mo agoDid you grab lunch at Smitty's? I live 5 miles west of the maker space in the last photo, and I've been thinking about getting some Meshtastic nodes...
- colanderman 10mo agoA gentle FYI for casuals interested in Meshtastic / MeshCore in the the USA: the default radio settings promoted by both these services are actually outside the parameters permitted by the FCC for unlicensed spread-spectrum operation, which require that such signals be spread over at least 500 kHz of spectrum [1]. Meshtastic "LongFast" spreads over only 250 kHz, and MeshCore "USA Recommended" over only 125 kHz. (500 kHz bandwidth is indeed a valid setting for the underlying LoRa protocol, and is used when the radios get certified.) Unfortunately the community meshes in most/all US metros have coalesced around these settings, meaning one is forced to choose between linking with "the" mesh, or operating legally. [1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/part-15/section-15.247#p-15.247(a)(2) https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/part-15/section-15.247...
- colanderman 10mo agoCorrection (too late to edit), MeshCore is 62.5 kHz bandwidth, not 125 kHz.
- ohokbro 10mo agoYou keep posting this nonsense all over, yet Meshtastic bends over backwards to operate legally. Either prove it by getting both mesh projects in trouble with the government or shut it. Your constant whining is annoying.
- aboardRat4 10mo agoWould you be interested in a small commercial application of your node? I need a few messages transmitted to as many peers as possible once in a while. Nothing illegal, just a small contribution to the economy. We're selling pure herbal organic medicine which helps males perform better, and our product announcement will fit perfectly in you 200 characters limit.
- mcdonje 10mo agoAre ads a thing on meshtastic? If a node is spamming ads, would I have the ability to block it?
- supernova87a 10mo agoHas anyone come across a good semi-technical description of "how your node knows that its message got sent and reached its destination and can stop sending"? I'm interested in how this logic is executed when you can't be sure (I assume) that knowledge of the result will get back to you in a certain amount of time.
- Evanito 10mo agoYou can find that here in the Layer 2 section: https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/mesh-algo/ https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/mesh-algo/ In short, all messages are sent within windows, which include waiting periods within which the broadcasting node listens for any other node to rebroadcast the same message. Upon seeing the message be rebroadcast, it stops attempting to send.
- supernova87a 10mo agoThanks!