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Anyone using Meshtastic/LoRA radio?
Just wondering if any other tildan electronics/radio hobbyists are playing around with Meshtastic. I got my first two nodes (right under the wire before the tariffs!) and set them up last weekend.
I got my first response today on the public channel from someone else a couple hops away and it honestly feels like 1993 again with that "can anyone read this?"-vibe the first time I posted on a BBS. The more I see how the internet becomes hostile to humans, the more I think something "human community-based" like this is the inevitable future.
Is anyone else on the Mesh yet? Are there a lot of nodes in your community? What do you think Meshtastic will amount to?
A friend and I were getting way into it around this time last year. I set up a solar-powered node high up in a tree and was able to see so many others in the general area. It's a cool system and I like that it's been getting traction. The issue for me, though, is that kind of like getting into ham radio it seems like once you get everything set up and working, then what? In my experience it just turns into an echo chamber of talking about your gear setup, waiting for a SHTF moment to be able to use your gear, etc., and not really doing anything else with it. Any thoughts from you all on what else to do with it?
I think the things that keep HAM contained to a degree are "licensing" and "no encryption / private conversations". LoRA solves both of those problem. I think it's possible that the following factors are all converging in a way that might lead to Mesh/LoRA having a "tipping point" moment in the near future:
I think there's some other things going for it too, and besides that it's just fun.
It's not really on any kind of trajectory towards #2 though. It's a low bandwidth communication method that's useful for something more like a text-based equivalent FRS. The average public mesh is 90% "is this thing on?" messages and then a smattering of gear posts. I could see #3, but probably only for a few years until they do have to deal with the modern world.
There's no tipping point. This stuff is as niche nerd as they come. That said, it is fun.
A bunch of members of Protospace Calgary (a local makerspace) and others have a huge network in Calgary, Canada. Covers the whole city, and have a number of solar powered nodes around (including hidden on the side of the rocky mountains that are reachable from some places in the city).
A protospace member also occasionally launches a meshtastic node on weather balloons, which someone on the meshastic subreddit even picked up floating over the UK last year haha
I have not used it, but I was just watching a video about meshtastic last week and was thinking of getting into it myself.
I feel like having truly decentralized alternatives for what we might consider essential services like telecommunication are an important step to escaping the civilizational rut we seem to be digging ourselves deeper and deeper into.
I picked up a pair to screw with and seem to have locked myself out of one pretty quickly (can no longer connect to it with my phone, and can't find many ways to fix that).
It's a neat idea though, so i'm sorta waiting for more development to get it user friendly.
Try reflashing the firmware to the device to get access to the device again. When you run the initial setup it'll bind the device to your phone.
https://flasher.meshtastic.org/
I did that too, I think! I "forgot" the Bluetooth device on my phone and it won't let me reconnect. It's early days for this stuff - a lot of the equipment/ui has sharp edges still.
There are only two active nodes in my community, and I've been thinking about investing in a few to see if I can get a few local businesses to agree to host them.
I'm interested in word from folks deploying them about which devices offer the best value for money.
Anyone have any resources they found helpful for getting started with this? I think I've seen stuff about this pop up on my Instagram feed, but haven't found a good leg in to start researching it. It sounds like a lot of fun though.
I watched a bunch of YouTube videos about it. Try "Jeff Geerling Meshtastic" - to see a good rundown of devices and setting them up. It's pretty easy, on the basic level. To just get a node and set it up is about 15ish dollars, maybe cheaper if you can get it off AliExpress.
Wouldn't say I'm using it, precisely, but I've got a node plugged in in my office. If nothing else, I'm growing the network!