8 ms·

An Introduction to Meshtastic

524 points by ColinWright 5mo ago

jqpabc123 5mo ago
Definitely interesting for special use cases. But I don't think the wireless carriers have anything to worry about here.
ranger_danger 5mo ago
Comparison of Meshtastic vs MeshCore: https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2026/03/23/meshcore-vs-meshtastic/ https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2026/03/23/meshcore-vs-mesh...
- pabs3 5mo ago
  And why MeshCore forked from Meshtastic: https://blog.meshcore.io/2026/04/23/the-split https://blog.meshcore.io/2026/04/23/the-split
  - stavros 5mo ago
    That article seems to be about how Meshcore split into two, with one contributor forking the code and taking the previously official website with him. There's no mention of Meshtastic.
    - celsoazevedo 5mo ago
      My understanding is that the split is more superficial than that. The contributor in question (he used to do YouTube videos mainly, no contributions to the firmware) created his own vibe coded app/client and is trying to own the trademark on the Meshcore name. He controls the .co.uk site, the youtube channel, and the discord group. The firmware is still the same, created by the people behind the new .io website. So the split is just a "the development team has nothing to do with the .co.uk site, his youtube channel and discord group", not a fork.
  - conficorrect 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  - celsoazevedo 5mo ago
    That post is about the development team "splitting" with the PR guy that is trying to get a trademark on the name and creating their own vibe coded paid client/app. There's a history between Tastic and Core, but it's a different one. Meshtastic doesn't scale that well in urban areas and it seems that some on the Mestastic team didn't see that problem as a priority/ignored the problem/are too stubborn. And then Meshcore is created with a different routing, works much better in practice, proving that the mesh could be much better. In countries like the UK it seems to have replaced Meshtastic in most places.
moffers 5mo ago
I took a plunge into learning about mesh networks, specifically because I love the idea of p2p/decentralized systems of communication. To be honest, I was surprised to find that my expectations for “where we are at” with this type of technology was pretty off-base. For some reason I thought by now it would be straightforward to do a little more than text messaging over a truly public and decentralized off-internet mesh. Maybe I’ve missed some things in my search (still learning!) and someone can correct my understanding.
- Panda_ 5mo ago
  The Reticulum Network Stack is a more generic lora capable protocol. It is intended to run over almost any two way link so it's less bandwidth efficient per packet than Meshtastic but in return it gives you packet routing rather than flooding. It can be run over TCP, LoRa, WiFi, etc. https://reticulum.network/start.html https://reticulum.network/start.html has an overview and how to connect. There is a manual with a lot more information on how it works and the ideas behind it at https://reticulum.network/manual/ https://reticulum.network/manual/ however it's quite large and not really a user friendly guide If you just want to play with it https://reticulum.network/manual/software.html https://reticulum.network/manual/software.html has a list of clients and software using it.
  - moffers 5mo ago
    This is awesome. I love that people are working on this. I wish for the day I can own a box that boots up, and gives me the 90s-00s internet experience without needing to ask permission from a bunch of middlemen.
    - disastronaut 5mo ago
      For the oldest school feel - https://spectrum.ieee.org/run-a-meshtastic-bbs https://spectrum.ieee.org/run-a-meshtastic-bbs
  - itomato 5mo ago
    Reticulum has more to offer, it’s just not the welcome mat/filter the others are. Chit-chat is one thing.
trunkiedozer 5mo ago
Some software needs to be refactored and vibe coded, this is the prime example of that.
- itomato 5mo ago
  Then what?
  - trunkiedozer 5mo ago
    Then it might work reliably
Cyan488 5mo ago
I had never heard of this before, then last week I watched a video about it and was hooked. Now I'm seeing it everywhere! Meshtastic and Meshcore are both cool LoRa-based mesh text messaging that operate in an no-license-required band. While this limits your transmit power, it doesn't prohibit encryption - the inverse of most ham radio rules! Some cities have thriving communities of Meshtastic and/or Meshcore. You can look at maps of coverage to get a very general idea - in my experience, most Meshtastic nodes are NOT listed, while a good number of Meshcore nodes are. Meshtastic treats the mesh as dynamic - clients are assumed to always be moving, so transmissions flood between different nodes that are in eachother's reach. Meshcore has a static layer - repeaters that are assumed to be in fixed positions - and a dynamic layer - companions that move. With fixed and hopefully reliable connections between repeaters, routing paths between two users can be 'cached', which avoid the bandwidth overhead of flood routing. You can get started with a low cost ($30) transceiver board and an SMA antenna ($10) for the ISM band of your region. Stick it in a box an mount it somewhere high up, and see if you can pick up any other nodes!
- RobotToaster 5mo ago
  The meshcore app is closed source
  - jeromegv 5mo ago
    The firmware is open source. There are many apps, some are open source, some are freeware.
  - squarefoot 5mo ago
    Does it apply to the meshcore.io app as well? From what I know (not a meshcore user currently) there has been a kerfuffle recently when a developer decided to fork and vibe code the project using Claude, then silently trademark the name and move everything to his own website. The original and legit site should be meshcore.io while the .co.uk site was created by that developer and isn't considered official nor reliable by the community.
  - wielebny 5mo ago
andybak 5mo ago
As someone interested in 3D and geometry but with no interest in radio - I find the naming clash most irritating!
- neilalexander 5mo ago
  If only I had a penny for every HN comment about naming conflicts.
  - andybak 5mo ago
    Well, it is one of the 2 hard problems...
spiritplumber 5mo ago
I wish they'd mention CellSol but eh. https://github.com/RbtsEvrwhr-Riley/CellSol https://github.com/RbtsEvrwhr-Riley/CellSol
- Novosell 5mo ago
  You wish Meshtatstic would mention CellSol on the Meshtatstic website? Why would they do that?
robotswantdata 5mo ago
Love meshtastic. There’s something about the setup friction that has the vibe of early internet, select community, high signal, nobody trying to monetize your attention.
- joemazerino 5mo ago
  Agreed. And opt-in. Early internet access required some knowledge about computers.
tekchip 5mo ago
If you setup meshtastic for the love of all that is holy reindex your channels so the public channel is 1 instead of 0. Range tests default to 0. The public channel in my area is regularly spammed with range test and is useless for any meaningful "community" communication. Instructions https://youtu.be/egAZP4KKHNo?t=419&si=s9_ML-GWEaP_bz-W https://youtu.be/egAZP4KKHNo?t=419&si=s9_ML-GWEaP_bz-W This seems like a horrible default setting or configuration. Why public channel isn't separated from a sort of control channel for those kind of station keeping messages is kind of mind boggling.
- esafak 5mo ago
  Has this issue been reported? It seems like an obvious design flaw.
  - mingus88 5mo ago
    Meshtastic doesn’t seem to work well in dense environments. It is known. In the PNW there are two very successful meshcore meshes, cascadimesh and psmesh. The former stretches all the way from Oregon to BC and the latter focuses more on the sound. I just switched over to the mesh core version of psmesh and instantly I was able to get chats from folk across the state. With the Meshtastic version I couldn’t see my friends nodes once we left the pub. And I never got a ping back from my tracker the next town over despite futzing with the channel settings for a couple days
perarneng 5mo ago
In russia they have limited internet now. something like mestastic is something everyone would need to make sure we could have communication even though someone tried to limit it.
- voidUpdate 5mo ago
  Is russia densely populated enough to be able to make it work? Around me I'm having trouble getting a connection to any other nodes because there isn't a critical mass of other people running mesh nodes and there's a hill between me and the next city
  - BadBadJellyBean 5mo ago
    Put one of these onto the hill and you might have more luck: https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005011893329415.html https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005011893329415.html You could also use their site planner to plan out optimal placement: https://site.meshtastic.org/ https://site.meshtastic.org/
    - voidUpdate 5mo ago
      I don't own the hill and there are people living on it, and I don't particularly want to hang up nodes on council property or worse, private property
  - subscribed 5mo ago
    I have 3 permanent gateways within 3 miles of my house (the closest is <1 mile away) and yet unless I hang my own gateway in the attic, I won't even hear anyone, even from the bedroom window that's at the direction of the closest gw. That means my awful, underpowered and suboptimally placed gw tries to take part in the network - I can't even make it repeat late (prefer other repeaters), so it jusg mostly adds to the noise (and increases power use). That's with Meshtastic With Meshcore? I was unable to hear even one transmission, and I love in the densely populated region. This doesn't really work, maybe as an impromptu off the grid chat platform for a forest walk, provided no one strays too far. Even 0.5W transceivers work better.
dewey 5mo ago
Somewhat related thread from the past days https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999636 that also discusses Reticulum which is an interesting project in the same space too. From what I could see the general vibe seems to be shifting from meshtastic to meshcore.io in the past months.
- szszrk 5mo ago
  It's a natural direction to hop from Meshtastic to Meshcore.io as the community grows. They are implemented a bit differently. The chatty nature of Meshtastic works very well in small groups, or unknown area, when you need to talk a bunch of your friends scattered during a trip, to monitor your tracktors on a large field, etc.. Then you try to scale it to a larger city and it just completely breaks. Then Meshcore.io enters the picture. Every larger community that switches says the same - it's a huge reliability difference. It also comes at a cost of some discipline and more infrastructure planning (repeater nodes). The more I play with both the more I respect both projects. As for Reticulum, I don't see it competing in the same category at all. It has much higher aspirations, but also it seems at the moment it's much less practical and popular.
  - Melatonic 5mo ago
    Seems like Meshtastic could be replaced by something like BitChat (no hardware needed) for smaller groups and adhoc use (like the example you give of a group on a trip) If you are going to have the setup and work of repeater nodes though doesnt something that gives actual network use between devices make more sense?
    - szszrk 5mo ago
      BitChat, Briar, yeah. But BT is way less capable in range. You can communicate across two hotel rooms at best. Maybe across the same bar, or empty outdoor space within small visual range. Can be useful, but often you will be able to just shout, instead. With Meshtastic/Meshcore you are open to scenarios like "a repeater on a boat, large group scattered across large marina, nearby town and hiking areas". Or "bigger family skiing in a large resort". You can get insane distances with great reliability if you place a node strategically on the highest point around. And it costs around $100 to buy an (off the shelf) solar node that can run close to 24/7. Some folks out there have amazing use cases in the mountains. > something that gives actual network use between devices make more sense There are plenty of Meshcore/Meshtastic independent devices. With keyboards or touch controls and all.
juancn 5mo ago
I find it weird that the hop limit is 3 bits, wouldn't that limit the effective range a lot? Unless an intermediate node lies and doesn't decrement and retransmits anyway.
- jeromegv 5mo ago
  Yep that’s one of the issues with Meshtastic and why it’s hard to scale it past a certain point. Meshcore has much higher hop limit
- laurowyn 5mo ago
  To be fair, the hop limit has to die somewhere. It's an intricate balancing act of causing packet storms vs failure to deliver messages. 6 degrees of separation is probably the intended design constraint, assuming there are sufficient nodes to do long range propagation it would work, so 3 bits should be enough in theory. Or passive repeaters as you suggest to go even further. But it seems in practice to be insufficient. Perhaps this is the reason Reticulum works so well? hop limit of 255, support for any transport mechnism so a fragmented internet is still suitable for long range propagation.
- AyyEye 5mo ago
  It's flood routed. 3 bits is probably far past what is practical, except in very linear low-node-count networks.
  - juancn 5mo ago
    Yeah, I was expecting something fancier than flood routing. Perhaps a per node hash of known recent routes to avoid flooding every single time and using flooding as a backup.
  - celsoazevedo 5mo ago
    Meshcore does up to 64 and I regularly see flood messages with +30 hops. They use a different routing though.
yardie 5mo ago
I've been using Meshtastic for years. Still have a few Heltec v2 nodes running. It's been a lot of fun. It also encouraged me to get my HAM license since most of the local meshtastic/meshcore users are also in the radio clubs. It reminds me of the early internet. In the early 90s the entire list of URLs could fill a notebook. And it was my first exposure to P2P nets. Meshtastic is a bit like that where it doesn't work well until you have a large enough community of nodes and gateways.
- mingus88 5mo ago
  Same. The internet isn’t fun anymore, and hasn’t been in a long time. These local meshes remind me of BBS days. You have to know a few things to access it and the community is all the better for it.
- prism56 5mo ago
  I tried meshtastic but there is literally nobody around me. It's like trying to get friends to use signal. I've moved to Meshcore recently and it gets me connected to the rest of the UK. But it took me 2 dedicated repeaters. I love the meshcore homesassitant plugin, managed to setup some alerts to send out a message on a private channel every 5 minutes if I lose power as an example.
  - bramgn 5mo ago
    Nice to hear your experience, as it sounds similar to where i'm currently at. I'm in the south of Norway and there's not much activity on Meshcore yet. I had set up a repeater on a nearby hill, and then one Saturday I started receiving messages in the public channel. At first I thought someone was passing by in town, but I soon realized (and confirmed) that these were messages from Denmark! Some were 200+ KMs away (mostly over sea). I was chatting to people and even able to login to a remote Repeater. I was flabbergasted. Now I'm using the amazing antenna coverage function within the MC app to find best locations of repeaters, which is a fun pastime on itself, especially in a hilly environment. It's a fun and educational exeperience if nothing else! It reminds me very much of packet radio back in the 90s, similar vibe.
axegon_ 5mo ago
I have a node running 24/7 (I also happen to be hosting one of the dozen or so things network nodes in my city) and while the idea is great, the adoption is close to 0. In a city with a 2+ million residents, I see a handful of users, as in less than 10. Same with the things network actually.
boredatoms 5mo ago
There was apparently drama, should we be using this or meshcore?
- srmatto 5mo ago
  I would try to select based on the merits of the project and its adoption instead of drama. For me the team behind meshtastic needs some help behind their approach to APIs, the app releases frequently break that contract and they probably just need a little help in that area to improve it. Meshcore sounds compelling to me because it has that fixed vs dynamic target approach which I suspect is more true to the real world given folks are standing up solar powered radios attached to fixed points and then trying to send messages from their phones. Edit: I guess meshcore isn't really a real project.
  - itomato 5mo ago
    the merits of one are largely vibe-coded by one overly enthusiastic guy.
    - srmatto 5mo ago
      This is the first I've heard of it so I guess its not a real project then.
      - lu5t 5mo ago
        It totally is a real project. Their marketing guy tried to take off with the trademark, long story. He's the vibe coder, and is trying to carry on like it's all good while the community went with the actual firmware/client devs. I'd argue at this point there's more MeshCore networks in the world than Meshtastic
    - celsoazevedo 5mo ago
      This is wrong. One guy associated with the project, but never a contributor to the firmware, decided to create his own vibe-coded client/app and to trademark the name of the project. The rest of the team said "no" to that and continued doing what they were doing before. The reason Meshcore works better for texting is the different routing. It has nothing to do with the recent drama.
eth0up 5mo ago
I recently received my ham (Technician) license. This was mostly a result of the state of conflict between various nations, but something I've long perceived as vital for community and individual resilience and stability in difficult times. Many are using GMRS, as it provides easy access to the entire family for $10 over ten years and requires no test. But as does most UHF/VHF or line-of-sight comms, it relies heavily on repeaters. My handle on meshtastic, LoRa, etc, is still first impression, but I know a lot is going on here, with compelling twists and alternatives in development, eg js8call?. I'm very interested, though haven't had time to learn anything yet. Being in Florida, which is 1) a power island 2) a hurricane magnet and burgeoning tornado scape among other vulnerabilities, resilient backup comms seems more than prudent. I've been procrastinating and distracted, but have had the idea of learning markdown and hugo, then making a Florida ham/mesh/LoRa/gmrs/etc website designed to be highly inclusive rather than exclusive, with the hopes of getting many involved. I don't know much yet, but the whole mesh subject is objectively fascinating and promising. I went from not knowing AM/FM to ham in two weeks of study. I'm still patching and catching up, but seriously interested. KR4KZI 73
- exographicskip 5mo ago
  Hats off to you on the ham license! My friend just got hers too! Re: markdown and hugo, that's an excellent combo. You could easily setup a raspberry pi or $5/mo vps to serve it behind caddy/traefik/nginx and have a working multipage app (mpa) in a weekend. Or a few minutes with AI haha
  - eth0up 5mo ago
    The AI route has proven exceedingly strange for me. Most notable are the absolutely wild variations in output quality, which range from brilliant to literally destructive and bizarre (GPT gave me a command during basic troubleshooting that completely bricked the firmware for my ip-cam*). Ideally this should be a viable option, but I seem to be a strangeness magnet with LLMs. *That and literally hundreds more equal or worse. After CopyFail (and apparently a lot more), I am thinking I might force myself to BSD for servers, and maybe even my work station. And there's a new idea! An LLM specifically trained for BSD....
neilv 5mo ago
I'd expect a group that cared about privacy and security... not to need a cookie consent dialog like that.
- Skunkleton 5mo ago
  My understanding is that the rules around those is similar to prop 65 rules. So unfocused as to dilute the original purpose.
  - wtallis 5mo ago
    The cookies used by the site appear to almost all be from Cloudflare, GitHub, YouTube: service providers that are not at all interested in enabling a cookie-free web site, and chose this route as malicious compliance. There's also one cookie to store a language preference that could be handled through HTTP headers instead.
    - Skunkleton 5mo ago
      Yeah, this is basically what happened with prop 65 as well.
itomato 5mo ago
To me, one of the most interesting parts of Meshtastic is the Websphere MQ roots of MQTT and all the goodness of observability and data analysis that comes from an open message broker. Light up MQTT-explorer and explore the default topics for a good laugh
sealWithIt 5mo ago
[dead]
sylens 5mo ago
So many of the off-the-shelf hardware options linked to are out of stock or discontinued. Feels like DIY is the only way right now
lu5t 5mo ago
If you're interested in Meshtastic, just try Meshcore instead. It's the natural hobbiest progression. Eventually you'll get tired of Meshtastic being nothing but telemetry from unknown nodes, nobody talks, it's a ghost town of weak links. Meshcore on the other hand has people actually having conversations, networks that span whole states, and diagnostic tools that actually work and are informative for describing the network around you.
- 3x35r22m4u 5mo ago
  Maybe it depends? In my city, the online map shows only 2 Meshcore nodes, while Meshtastic 36 nodes. And I've never spent time learning about it, but I'm under the impression Meshtastic is all about open-source and closer to ham radio philosophy, while Meshcore is backed by some for-profit organization?
  - lu5t 5mo ago
    Meshcore is MIT licensed open source firmware. There are both open source and closed source client softwares. You get to choose which you support. I think that's where the confusion comes in. It's no more for-profit than Meshtastic, which gets revenue from partnerships with hardware vendors
- dpedu 5mo ago
  The biggest problem with Meshtastic is that discussions about it inevitably get spammed by Meshcore evangelicals.
  - lu5t 5mo ago
    true, that tends to happen when there's a better but lesser known choice for most applications; one feels motivated to share. To each their own though, there's all kinds out here. Some people like linux, some people like windows, some like to do both
  - mikeytown2 5mo ago
    It's because we've tried Meshtastic and MeshCore. Look at where the bytes go in the network. Meshtastic it's usually under 5% of traffic is text and for MeshCore it's over 50%. If you want to communicate MeshCore is designed to do that.
_stiofan 5mo ago
I haven't messed with this yet, to me it seems like it could theoretically map all device locations, triangulating positions? Has that been addressed?
- forsalebypwner 5mo ago
  Yes, as I understand it, you choose the level of location precision to share https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/channels/#position-precision https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/channels/#po...
- Forge36 5mo ago
  That's known as Transmitter Hunting (aka Fox Hunting). It's a fundamental flaw of most wireless communication. Are you referring to something more specific?
  - _stiofan 5mo ago
    I think that is more of a directional antenna approach? I’m more talking about triangulation, we used to be able to do it with cell towers and if you had 3 or more in range we could get pretty accurate location (now that seems to be locked down).
blhack 5mo ago
Meshtastic is really cool! The heltec v4 is the best board for it you can get on Amazon. Put it on your roof with a cheap solar panel meant for a security camera, and join it to your home WiFi. Just use the little plastic case it came in as an enclosure. Cut a hole for the antenna and USB. A slightly larger antenna will help. There are many on Amazon, and they’re cheap. (I have tried lots of boards and this has been the best setup for me)
walrus01 5mo ago
For people who don't think they have an immediate use for either meshtastic or meshcore, it's fine to disregard it and just dig in further into the capabilities of the LoRA radios used. They can be used fairly effectively for some very long reach serial bridge connections for telemetry and command/control of DIY IOT things and similar. LoRA is also used extensively for hobby size UAV handheld controller/ground control station to air unit controls, and in its narrower channel sizes can be very long range. The well known TBS crossfire serial bridge radio system which predates LoRA by a number of years uses a chipset that is sort of an ancestor of current-gen LoRA stuff.
hansjorg 5mo ago
Benn Jordan (The Flashbulb) has a good video on this and some other interesting related topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_F4rEaRduk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_F4rEaRduk
compumike 5mo ago
Check out this map: https://api.phillymesh.net/map https://api.phillymesh.net/map for live data from the Philadelphia area. The edges drawn are between nodes that have been able to hear each other in the last 24 hours, based on observed traceroute packets. (Even then, it’s only a subset of the actually-connected nodes: the map only shows nodes that have published their position on the public channel, and have set a flag that their data is okay to uplink to a server over MQTT.)
allanrbo 5mo ago
If anyone's interested in the really low level radio modulation bits too, you might enjoy this talk I gave at last years Defcon: https://youtu.be/SM1XSxP6W78 https://youtu.be/SM1XSxP6W78
- swaits 5mo ago
  You might like a project I’ve been having on. I’m having fun with it. https://donglora.com/ https://donglora.com/
darksim905 5mo ago
I'm surprised there's many comments here, and so many folks even still who haven't heard of Mesh. And no real comments on them as an organization. Mesh topology like this is cool, and the concept is cool. Meshtastic as an organization with one of their leadership being a lawyer and being very litiguous to protect their naming scheme, not so much. They go after so many projects, ideas and other things that say they are 'Meshtastic' powered. There's a whole discord of them. It is disheartening and very jarring. They want to use the moniker of M-Powered or M-PWRD which has no identity or meaning. https://meshtastic.org/docs/legal/licensing-and-trademark/ https://meshtastic.org/docs/legal/licensing-and-trademark/
bergie 5mo ago
We are in the South Pacific with our sailboat, and are using Meshtastic every day to talk between ourselves and with various buddy boats. The boat has a solar-powered repeater (CLIENT_BASE) on the mast that increases communications range significantly. This all works great with no local SIM cards or other subscriptions or infrastructure needed. We plan to run experiments with Reticulum when we stop for the cyclone season. Reticulum would open a lot more possibilities with both LoRa and internet-based comms. The Columba app seems to do a lot to bridge the usability gap, but work will need to be done to integrate Reticulum with our boat systems the way we have with Meshtastic (alerting, telemetry, digital switching control).
- mtlynch 5mo ago
  Parent wrote a great blog post about this for anyone interested in the details: https://blog.noforeignland.com/off-grid-boat-communications-with-meshtastic/ https://blog.noforeignland.com/off-grid-boat-communications-...
- bearded_comrade 5mo ago
  I've always thought that meshtastic (or something similar) would be great for cruisers. Have you encountered anyone else using it?
  - bergie 5mo ago
    A few boats, yes. But it is still a "new thing". Before leaving Panama I ordered a stack of cheap Heltec V3 Meshtastic boards so we can give some to our buddy boats
- Levitating 5mo ago
  I just bought three SenseCap T1000-E's for the exact same purpose. Sadly I sail on the other side of the world so we likely won't be connecting.
  - bergie 5mo ago
    We started this trip with a summer cruise in Scotland, so who knows where we'll end up
drdaeman 5mo ago
Meshtastic is… okay, but I was seriously put off the fact that a node can’t work with multiple clients (like phone and desktop) cooperatively, even with TCP transports. And that’s a protocol design issue, it has single client in mind. Virtual nodes didn’t work for me (I verified every configurable knob but I haven’t bothered debugging what goes on under the hood). But it’s the only radio-based mesh network I’ve ever “seen” anyone else on.
- simonjgreen 5mo ago
  Have a look at meshrank and the current map over UK. It’s quite wild how much coverage there is.
danborn26 5mo ago
Meshtastic has been a game changer for local off-grid comms. The barrier to entry with ESP32 LoRa boards is low enough that anyone can spin up a node in minutes. Glad to see it getting more attention here.

524 points by ColinWright 5mo ago

Definitely interesting for special use cases. But I don't think the wireless carriers have anything to worry about here.

ranger_danger 5mo ago

Comparison of Meshtastic vs MeshCore: https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2026/03/23/meshcore-vs-meshtastic/ https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2026/03/23/meshcore-vs-mesh...

pabs3 5mo ago
And why MeshCore forked from Meshtastic: https://blog.meshcore.io/2026/04/23/the-split https://blog.meshcore.io/2026/04/23/the-split
- stavros 5mo ago
  That article seems to be about how Meshcore split into two, with one contributor forking the code and taking the previously official website with him. There's no mention of Meshtastic.
  - celsoazevedo 5mo ago
    My understanding is that the split is more superficial than that. The contributor in question (he used to do YouTube videos mainly, no contributions to the firmware) created his own vibe coded app/client and is trying to own the trademark on the Meshcore name. He controls the .co.uk site, the youtube channel, and the discord group. The firmware is still the same, created by the people behind the new .io website. So the split is just a "the development team has nothing to do with the .co.uk site, his youtube channel and discord group", not a fork.
- conficorrect 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- celsoazevedo 5mo ago
  That post is about the development team "splitting" with the PR guy that is trying to get a trademark on the name and creating their own vibe coded paid client/app. There's a history between Tastic and Core, but it's a different one. Meshtastic doesn't scale that well in urban areas and it seems that some on the Mestastic team didn't see that problem as a priority/ignored the problem/are too stubborn. And then Meshcore is created with a different routing, works much better in practice, proving that the mesh could be much better. In countries like the UK it seems to have replaced Meshtastic in most places.

moffers 5mo ago

I took a plunge into learning about mesh networks, specifically because I love the idea of p2p/decentralized systems of communication. To be honest, I was surprised to find that my expectations for “where we are at” with this type of technology was pretty off-base. For some reason I thought by now it would be straightforward to do a little more than text messaging over a truly public and decentralized off-internet mesh. Maybe I’ve missed some things in my search (still learning!) and someone can correct my understanding.

Panda_ 5mo ago
The Reticulum Network Stack is a more generic lora capable protocol. It is intended to run over almost any two way link so it's less bandwidth efficient per packet than Meshtastic but in return it gives you packet routing rather than flooding. It can be run over TCP, LoRa, WiFi, etc. https://reticulum.network/start.html https://reticulum.network/start.html has an overview and how to connect. There is a manual with a lot more information on how it works and the ideas behind it at https://reticulum.network/manual/ https://reticulum.network/manual/ however it's quite large and not really a user friendly guide If you just want to play with it https://reticulum.network/manual/software.html https://reticulum.network/manual/software.html has a list of clients and software using it.
- moffers 5mo ago
  This is awesome. I love that people are working on this. I wish for the day I can own a box that boots up, and gives me the 90s-00s internet experience without needing to ask permission from a bunch of middlemen.
  - disastronaut 5mo ago
    For the oldest school feel - https://spectrum.ieee.org/run-a-meshtastic-bbs https://spectrum.ieee.org/run-a-meshtastic-bbs
- itomato 5mo ago
  Reticulum has more to offer, it’s just not the welcome mat/filter the others are. Chit-chat is one thing.

trunkiedozer 5mo ago

Some software needs to be refactored and vibe coded, this is the prime example of that.

itomato 5mo ago
Then what?
- trunkiedozer 5mo ago
  Then it might work reliably

Cyan488 5mo ago

I had never heard of this before, then last week I watched a video about it and was hooked. Now I'm seeing it everywhere! Meshtastic and Meshcore are both cool LoRa-based mesh text messaging that operate in an no-license-required band. While this limits your transmit power, it doesn't prohibit encryption - the inverse of most ham radio rules! Some cities have thriving communities of Meshtastic and/or Meshcore. You can look at maps of coverage to get a very general idea - in my experience, most Meshtastic nodes are NOT listed, while a good number of Meshcore nodes are. Meshtastic treats the mesh as dynamic - clients are assumed to always be moving, so transmissions flood between different nodes that are in eachother's reach. Meshcore has a static layer - repeaters that are assumed to be in fixed positions - and a dynamic layer - companions that move. With fixed and hopefully reliable connections between repeaters, routing paths between two users can be 'cached', which avoid the bandwidth overhead of flood routing. You can get started with a low cost ($30) transceiver board and an SMA antenna ($10) for the ISM band of your region. Stick it in a box an mount it somewhere high up, and see if you can pick up any other nodes!

RobotToaster 5mo ago
The meshcore app is closed source
- jeromegv 5mo ago
  The firmware is open source. There are many apps, some are open source, some are freeware.
- squarefoot 5mo ago
  Does it apply to the meshcore.io app as well? From what I know (not a meshcore user currently) there has been a kerfuffle recently when a developer decided to fork and vibe code the project using Claude, then silently trademark the name and move everything to his own website. The original and legit site should be meshcore.io while the .co.uk site was created by that developer and isn't considered official nor reliable by the community.
- wielebny 5mo ago

andybak 5mo ago

As someone interested in 3D and geometry but with no interest in radio - I find the naming clash most irritating!

neilalexander 5mo ago
If only I had a penny for every HN comment about naming conflicts.
- andybak 5mo ago
  Well, it is one of the 2 hard problems...

spiritplumber 5mo ago

I wish they'd mention CellSol but eh. https://github.com/RbtsEvrwhr-Riley/CellSol https://github.com/RbtsEvrwhr-Riley/CellSol

Novosell 5mo ago
You wish Meshtatstic would mention CellSol on the Meshtatstic website? Why would they do that?

robotswantdata 5mo ago

Love meshtastic. There’s something about the setup friction that has the vibe of early internet, select community, high signal, nobody trying to monetize your attention.

joemazerino 5mo ago
Agreed. And opt-in. Early internet access required some knowledge about computers.

tekchip 5mo ago

If you setup meshtastic for the love of all that is holy reindex your channels so the public channel is 1 instead of 0. Range tests default to 0. The public channel in my area is regularly spammed with range test and is useless for any meaningful "community" communication. Instructions https://youtu.be/egAZP4KKHNo?t=419&si=s9_ML-GWEaP_bz-W https://youtu.be/egAZP4KKHNo?t=419&si=s9_ML-GWEaP_bz-W This seems like a horrible default setting or configuration. Why public channel isn't separated from a sort of control channel for those kind of station keeping messages is kind of mind boggling.

esafak 5mo ago
Has this issue been reported? It seems like an obvious design flaw.
- mingus88 5mo ago
  Meshtastic doesn’t seem to work well in dense environments. It is known. In the PNW there are two very successful meshcore meshes, cascadimesh and psmesh. The former stretches all the way from Oregon to BC and the latter focuses more on the sound. I just switched over to the mesh core version of psmesh and instantly I was able to get chats from folk across the state. With the Meshtastic version I couldn’t see my friends nodes once we left the pub. And I never got a ping back from my tracker the next town over despite futzing with the channel settings for a couple days

perarneng 5mo ago

In russia they have limited internet now. something like mestastic is something everyone would need to make sure we could have communication even though someone tried to limit it.

voidUpdate 5mo ago
Is russia densely populated enough to be able to make it work? Around me I'm having trouble getting a connection to any other nodes because there isn't a critical mass of other people running mesh nodes and there's a hill between me and the next city
- BadBadJellyBean 5mo ago
  Put one of these onto the hill and you might have more luck: https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005011893329415.html https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005011893329415.html You could also use their site planner to plan out optimal placement: https://site.meshtastic.org/ https://site.meshtastic.org/
  - voidUpdate 5mo ago
    I don't own the hill and there are people living on it, and I don't particularly want to hang up nodes on council property or worse, private property
- subscribed 5mo ago
  I have 3 permanent gateways within 3 miles of my house (the closest is <1 mile away) and yet unless I hang my own gateway in the attic, I won't even hear anyone, even from the bedroom window that's at the direction of the closest gw. That means my awful, underpowered and suboptimally placed gw tries to take part in the network - I can't even make it repeat late (prefer other repeaters), so it jusg mostly adds to the noise (and increases power use). That's with Meshtastic With Meshcore? I was unable to hear even one transmission, and I love in the densely populated region. This doesn't really work, maybe as an impromptu off the grid chat platform for a forest walk, provided no one strays too far. Even 0.5W transceivers work better.

dewey 5mo ago

Somewhat related thread from the past days https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999636 that also discusses Reticulum which is an interesting project in the same space too. From what I could see the general vibe seems to be shifting from meshtastic to meshcore.io in the past months.

szszrk 5mo ago
It's a natural direction to hop from Meshtastic to Meshcore.io as the community grows. They are implemented a bit differently. The chatty nature of Meshtastic works very well in small groups, or unknown area, when you need to talk a bunch of your friends scattered during a trip, to monitor your tracktors on a large field, etc.. Then you try to scale it to a larger city and it just completely breaks. Then Meshcore.io enters the picture. Every larger community that switches says the same - it's a huge reliability difference. It also comes at a cost of some discipline and more infrastructure planning (repeater nodes). The more I play with both the more I respect both projects. As for Reticulum, I don't see it competing in the same category at all. It has much higher aspirations, but also it seems at the moment it's much less practical and popular.
- Melatonic 5mo ago
  Seems like Meshtastic could be replaced by something like BitChat (no hardware needed) for smaller groups and adhoc use (like the example you give of a group on a trip) If you are going to have the setup and work of repeater nodes though doesnt something that gives actual network use between devices make more sense?
  - szszrk 5mo ago
    BitChat, Briar, yeah. But BT is way less capable in range. You can communicate across two hotel rooms at best. Maybe across the same bar, or empty outdoor space within small visual range. Can be useful, but often you will be able to just shout, instead. With Meshtastic/Meshcore you are open to scenarios like "a repeater on a boat, large group scattered across large marina, nearby town and hiking areas". Or "bigger family skiing in a large resort". You can get insane distances with great reliability if you place a node strategically on the highest point around. And it costs around $100 to buy an (off the shelf) solar node that can run close to 24/7. Some folks out there have amazing use cases in the mountains. > something that gives actual network use between devices make more sense There are plenty of Meshcore/Meshtastic independent devices. With keyboards or touch controls and all.

juancn 5mo ago

I find it weird that the hop limit is 3 bits, wouldn't that limit the effective range a lot? Unless an intermediate node lies and doesn't decrement and retransmits anyway.

jeromegv 5mo ago
Yep that’s one of the issues with Meshtastic and why it’s hard to scale it past a certain point. Meshcore has much higher hop limit
laurowyn 5mo ago
To be fair, the hop limit has to die somewhere. It's an intricate balancing act of causing packet storms vs failure to deliver messages. 6 degrees of separation is probably the intended design constraint, assuming there are sufficient nodes to do long range propagation it would work, so 3 bits should be enough in theory. Or passive repeaters as you suggest to go even further. But it seems in practice to be insufficient. Perhaps this is the reason Reticulum works so well? hop limit of 255, support for any transport mechnism so a fragmented internet is still suitable for long range propagation.
AyyEye 5mo ago
It's flood routed. 3 bits is probably far past what is practical, except in very linear low-node-count networks.
- juancn 5mo ago
  Yeah, I was expecting something fancier than flood routing. Perhaps a per node hash of known recent routes to avoid flooding every single time and using flooding as a backup.
- celsoazevedo 5mo ago
  Meshcore does up to 64 and I regularly see flood messages with +30 hops. They use a different routing though.

yardie 5mo ago

I've been using Meshtastic for years. Still have a few Heltec v2 nodes running. It's been a lot of fun. It also encouraged me to get my HAM license since most of the local meshtastic/meshcore users are also in the radio clubs. It reminds me of the early internet. In the early 90s the entire list of URLs could fill a notebook. And it was my first exposure to P2P nets. Meshtastic is a bit like that where it doesn't work well until you have a large enough community of nodes and gateways.

mingus88 5mo ago
Same. The internet isn’t fun anymore, and hasn’t been in a long time. These local meshes remind me of BBS days. You have to know a few things to access it and the community is all the better for it.
prism56 5mo ago
I tried meshtastic but there is literally nobody around me. It's like trying to get friends to use signal. I've moved to Meshcore recently and it gets me connected to the rest of the UK. But it took me 2 dedicated repeaters. I love the meshcore homesassitant plugin, managed to setup some alerts to send out a message on a private channel every 5 minutes if I lose power as an example.
- bramgn 5mo ago
  Nice to hear your experience, as it sounds similar to where i'm currently at. I'm in the south of Norway and there's not much activity on Meshcore yet. I had set up a repeater on a nearby hill, and then one Saturday I started receiving messages in the public channel. At first I thought someone was passing by in town, but I soon realized (and confirmed) that these were messages from Denmark! Some were 200+ KMs away (mostly over sea). I was chatting to people and even able to login to a remote Repeater. I was flabbergasted. Now I'm using the amazing antenna coverage function within the MC app to find best locations of repeaters, which is a fun pastime on itself, especially in a hilly environment. It's a fun and educational exeperience if nothing else! It reminds me very much of packet radio back in the 90s, similar vibe.

axegon_ 5mo ago

I have a node running 24/7 (I also happen to be hosting one of the dozen or so things network nodes in my city) and while the idea is great, the adoption is close to 0. In a city with a 2+ million residents, I see a handful of users, as in less than 10. Same with the things network actually.

boredatoms 5mo ago

There was apparently drama, should we be using this or meshcore?

srmatto 5mo ago
I would try to select based on the merits of the project and its adoption instead of drama. For me the team behind meshtastic needs some help behind their approach to APIs, the app releases frequently break that contract and they probably just need a little help in that area to improve it. Meshcore sounds compelling to me because it has that fixed vs dynamic target approach which I suspect is more true to the real world given folks are standing up solar powered radios attached to fixed points and then trying to send messages from their phones. Edit: I guess meshcore isn't really a real project.
- itomato 5mo ago
  the merits of one are largely vibe-coded by one overly enthusiastic guy.
  - srmatto 5mo ago
    This is the first I've heard of it so I guess its not a real project then.
    - lu5t 5mo ago
      It totally is a real project. Their marketing guy tried to take off with the trademark, long story. He's the vibe coder, and is trying to carry on like it's all good while the community went with the actual firmware/client devs. I'd argue at this point there's more MeshCore networks in the world than Meshtastic
  - celsoazevedo 5mo ago
    This is wrong. One guy associated with the project, but never a contributor to the firmware, decided to create his own vibe-coded client/app and to trademark the name of the project. The rest of the team said "no" to that and continued doing what they were doing before. The reason Meshcore works better for texting is the different routing. It has nothing to do with the recent drama.

eth0up 5mo ago

I recently received my ham (Technician) license. This was mostly a result of the state of conflict between various nations, but something I've long perceived as vital for community and individual resilience and stability in difficult times. Many are using GMRS, as it provides easy access to the entire family for $10 over ten years and requires no test. But as does most UHF/VHF or line-of-sight comms, it relies heavily on repeaters. My handle on meshtastic, LoRa, etc, is still first impression, but I know a lot is going on here, with compelling twists and alternatives in development, eg js8call?. I'm very interested, though haven't had time to learn anything yet. Being in Florida, which is 1) a power island 2) a hurricane magnet and burgeoning tornado scape among other vulnerabilities, resilient backup comms seems more than prudent. I've been procrastinating and distracted, but have had the idea of learning markdown and hugo, then making a Florida ham/mesh/LoRa/gmrs/etc website designed to be highly inclusive rather than exclusive, with the hopes of getting many involved. I don't know much yet, but the whole mesh subject is objectively fascinating and promising. I went from not knowing AM/FM to ham in two weeks of study. I'm still patching and catching up, but seriously interested. KR4KZI 73

exographicskip 5mo ago
Hats off to you on the ham license! My friend just got hers too! Re: markdown and hugo, that's an excellent combo. You could easily setup a raspberry pi or $5/mo vps to serve it behind caddy/traefik/nginx and have a working multipage app (mpa) in a weekend. Or a few minutes with AI haha
- eth0up 5mo ago
  The AI route has proven exceedingly strange for me. Most notable are the absolutely wild variations in output quality, which range from brilliant to literally destructive and bizarre (GPT gave me a command during basic troubleshooting that completely bricked the firmware for my ip-cam*). Ideally this should be a viable option, but I seem to be a strangeness magnet with LLMs. *That and literally hundreds more equal or worse. After CopyFail (and apparently a lot more), I am thinking I might force myself to BSD for servers, and maybe even my work station. And there's a new idea! An LLM specifically trained for BSD....

neilv 5mo ago

I'd expect a group that cared about privacy and security... not to need a cookie consent dialog like that.

Skunkleton 5mo ago
My understanding is that the rules around those is similar to prop 65 rules. So unfocused as to dilute the original purpose.
- wtallis 5mo ago
  The cookies used by the site appear to almost all be from Cloudflare, GitHub, YouTube: service providers that are not at all interested in enabling a cookie-free web site, and chose this route as malicious compliance. There's also one cookie to store a language preference that could be handled through HTTP headers instead.
  - Skunkleton 5mo ago
    Yeah, this is basically what happened with prop 65 as well.

itomato 5mo ago

To me, one of the most interesting parts of Meshtastic is the Websphere MQ roots of MQTT and all the goodness of observability and data analysis that comes from an open message broker. Light up MQTT-explorer and explore the default topics for a good laugh

sealWithIt 5mo ago

[dead]

sylens 5mo ago

So many of the off-the-shelf hardware options linked to are out of stock or discontinued. Feels like DIY is the only way right now

lu5t 5mo ago

If you're interested in Meshtastic, just try Meshcore instead. It's the natural hobbiest progression. Eventually you'll get tired of Meshtastic being nothing but telemetry from unknown nodes, nobody talks, it's a ghost town of weak links. Meshcore on the other hand has people actually having conversations, networks that span whole states, and diagnostic tools that actually work and are informative for describing the network around you.

3x35r22m4u 5mo ago
Maybe it depends? In my city, the online map shows only 2 Meshcore nodes, while Meshtastic 36 nodes. And I've never spent time learning about it, but I'm under the impression Meshtastic is all about open-source and closer to ham radio philosophy, while Meshcore is backed by some for-profit organization?
- lu5t 5mo ago
  Meshcore is MIT licensed open source firmware. There are both open source and closed source client softwares. You get to choose which you support. I think that's where the confusion comes in. It's no more for-profit than Meshtastic, which gets revenue from partnerships with hardware vendors
dpedu 5mo ago
The biggest problem with Meshtastic is that discussions about it inevitably get spammed by Meshcore evangelicals.
- lu5t 5mo ago
  true, that tends to happen when there's a better but lesser known choice for most applications; one feels motivated to share. To each their own though, there's all kinds out here. Some people like linux, some people like windows, some like to do both
- mikeytown2 5mo ago
  It's because we've tried Meshtastic and MeshCore. Look at where the bytes go in the network. Meshtastic it's usually under 5% of traffic is text and for MeshCore it's over 50%. If you want to communicate MeshCore is designed to do that.

_stiofan 5mo ago

I haven't messed with this yet, to me it seems like it could theoretically map all device locations, triangulating positions? Has that been addressed?

forsalebypwner 5mo ago
Yes, as I understand it, you choose the level of location precision to share https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/channels/#position-precision https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/channels/#po...
Forge36 5mo ago
That's known as Transmitter Hunting (aka Fox Hunting). It's a fundamental flaw of most wireless communication. Are you referring to something more specific?
- _stiofan 5mo ago
  I think that is more of a directional antenna approach? I’m more talking about triangulation, we used to be able to do it with cell towers and if you had 3 or more in range we could get pretty accurate location (now that seems to be locked down).

blhack 5mo ago

Meshtastic is really cool! The heltec v4 is the best board for it you can get on Amazon. Put it on your roof with a cheap solar panel meant for a security camera, and join it to your home WiFi. Just use the little plastic case it came in as an enclosure. Cut a hole for the antenna and USB. A slightly larger antenna will help. There are many on Amazon, and they’re cheap. (I have tried lots of boards and this has been the best setup for me)

walrus01 5mo ago

For people who don't think they have an immediate use for either meshtastic or meshcore, it's fine to disregard it and just dig in further into the capabilities of the LoRA radios used. They can be used fairly effectively for some very long reach serial bridge connections for telemetry and command/control of DIY IOT things and similar. LoRA is also used extensively for hobby size UAV handheld controller/ground control station to air unit controls, and in its narrower channel sizes can be very long range. The well known TBS crossfire serial bridge radio system which predates LoRA by a number of years uses a chipset that is sort of an ancestor of current-gen LoRA stuff.

hansjorg 5mo ago

Benn Jordan (The Flashbulb) has a good video on this and some other interesting related topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_F4rEaRduk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_F4rEaRduk

compumike 5mo ago

Check out this map: https://api.phillymesh.net/map https://api.phillymesh.net/map for live data from the Philadelphia area. The edges drawn are between nodes that have been able to hear each other in the last 24 hours, based on observed traceroute packets. (Even then, it’s only a subset of the actually-connected nodes: the map only shows nodes that have published their position on the public channel, and have set a flag that their data is okay to uplink to a server over MQTT.)

allanrbo 5mo ago

If anyone's interested in the really low level radio modulation bits too, you might enjoy this talk I gave at last years Defcon: https://youtu.be/SM1XSxP6W78 https://youtu.be/SM1XSxP6W78

swaits 5mo ago
You might like a project I’ve been having on. I’m having fun with it. https://donglora.com/ https://donglora.com/

darksim905 5mo ago

I'm surprised there's many comments here, and so many folks even still who haven't heard of Mesh. And no real comments on them as an organization. Mesh topology like this is cool, and the concept is cool. Meshtastic as an organization with one of their leadership being a lawyer and being very litiguous to protect their naming scheme, not so much. They go after so many projects, ideas and other things that say they are 'Meshtastic' powered. There's a whole discord of them. It is disheartening and very jarring. They want to use the moniker of M-Powered or M-PWRD which has no identity or meaning. https://meshtastic.org/docs/legal/licensing-and-trademark/ https://meshtastic.org/docs/legal/licensing-and-trademark/

bergie 5mo ago

We are in the South Pacific with our sailboat, and are using Meshtastic every day to talk between ourselves and with various buddy boats. The boat has a solar-powered repeater (CLIENT_BASE) on the mast that increases communications range significantly. This all works great with no local SIM cards or other subscriptions or infrastructure needed. We plan to run experiments with Reticulum when we stop for the cyclone season. Reticulum would open a lot more possibilities with both LoRa and internet-based comms. The Columba app seems to do a lot to bridge the usability gap, but work will need to be done to integrate Reticulum with our boat systems the way we have with Meshtastic (alerting, telemetry, digital switching control).

mtlynch 5mo ago
Parent wrote a great blog post about this for anyone interested in the details: https://blog.noforeignland.com/off-grid-boat-communications-with-meshtastic/ https://blog.noforeignland.com/off-grid-boat-communications-...
bearded_comrade 5mo ago
I've always thought that meshtastic (or something similar) would be great for cruisers. Have you encountered anyone else using it?
- bergie 5mo ago
  A few boats, yes. But it is still a "new thing". Before leaving Panama I ordered a stack of cheap Heltec V3 Meshtastic boards so we can give some to our buddy boats
Levitating 5mo ago
I just bought three SenseCap T1000-E's for the exact same purpose. Sadly I sail on the other side of the world so we likely won't be connecting.
- bergie 5mo ago
  We started this trip with a summer cruise in Scotland, so who knows where we'll end up

drdaeman 5mo ago

Meshtastic is… okay, but I was seriously put off the fact that a node can’t work with multiple clients (like phone and desktop) cooperatively, even with TCP transports. And that’s a protocol design issue, it has single client in mind. Virtual nodes didn’t work for me (I verified every configurable knob but I haven’t bothered debugging what goes on under the hood). But it’s the only radio-based mesh network I’ve ever “seen” anyone else on.

simonjgreen 5mo ago
Have a look at meshrank and the current map over UK. It’s quite wild how much coverage there is.

danborn26 5mo ago

Meshtastic has been a game changer for local off-grid comms. The barrier to entry with ESP32 LoRa boards is low enough that anyone can spin up a node in minutes. Glad to see it getting more attention here.