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Any one use mesh networks like mesh core?
I don’t know if anyone is interest in mesh networks like MeshCore. I have been dabbling in it, and it’s an interesting concept of distributed LoRa radios making a community network.
There has been some recent drama with MeshCore where in a nutshell there has been a disagreement over control of the project and probably ultimately money.
If anyone else uses MeshCore (or meshtastic), what has your experience of it been? What are your thoughts about the future of the project with the drama? I don’t think it will be a big deal, I suspect it will blow over without a large fracture but it’s very much a guess rather than considered view.
My partner and I played around with some LoRa devices during a con at the start of the year- I had purchased a number of the Seeed Tracker L1 boards, and designed and printed some casings for them. I deliberately chose meshtastic over meshcore because the latter was giving off the wrong vibes (turf-war nonsense, and astroturfing on forums any time meshtastic came up). Unfortunately, while fun to play around with, they were never reliable enough to be useful. On top of that, the L1 devices would empty their batteries with no GPS lock. I will probably mess around with them again at some point- maybe they have other uses?
I also got some wrong vibes from mesh core, but then I equally got those vibes from meshtastic too. Ultimately I preferred the software architecture of mesh core and in the UK it seems a lot more popular. Having a backbone of repeaters seems to make it more scalable. I will reserve judgement about reliability at present until I have more experience.
I use a t-1000e device which is very portable but antenna is very limited. I was going to try the L1 actually, can you expand on the issue you were having? Do you mean when it can’t get a GPS lock the battery drained quickly?
I agree that a backbone of existing infra would massively improve the usability of the network. Maybe I'll try meshcore at some point, though I'll have to check what existing nodes there are around me first.
And, yes. That is exactly the problem with the device. With a GPS lock, it will happily sip from a 2000mah battery over five or six days, but if you keep the device inside anything built better than a shed it will eat the battery in under 24h.
Wow interesting, I didn’t know that was an issues with it. I’ll have to have a think about maybe an alternative device.
I've been investigating but not pulled the trigger. I think I'd feel better if the PA contingent of tildos started a project :)
I've got a pair of T-1000e:s and two Heltec V3s running Meshtastic
I can get surprisingly long ranges with just two T-1000 units in an urban setting. Most likely even more when I get around to it and try to get one CLIENT_MUTE setup outside with a Proper Antenna.
But the most interesting things you can do with them is home automation and sensors. Like I have one in my car, pinging some useless measurements on an encrypted Radio-only channel. The unit in my home will pick it up when it's close enough. Or plug it in to home assistant and have a fully independent way of remotely controlling the devices linked to HA.
And again, when I get around to the physical bit, I'll add a bigger external antenna to the car one and have it act as a repeater only. So I'm inside a building, can't reach any nodes -> but I can reach my car node, which will re-send it.
I bought an R1 Neo during last Christmas. It was a bit of a pain picking a device and choosing between MeshCore and Meshtastic as a newbie, I went the easier route of buying a device that already "works" in the Mestastic network.
I use quotes because I guess it technically works as designed but it wasn't what I expected, there are a lot of nodes around me and still (or maybe because of it?) the communication is flimsy. It's definitely not for emergencies.
At some point I lost interest and simply left it on 24/7 to see the map filling up with nodes around my area. Not all of them share location but it's still kinda fun to see the ones that do.
Other than that I'll probably not use it again :/
I have a couple small meshtastic Heltec V3 radios which I've dabbled with, but unfortunately we live in a place with poor line of sight to neighboring areas (in kind of a depression) and even though I take it to work into a busy suburb of a metro area, I rarely see any local activity, so it hasn't been all that useful. Strangely enough, I'm now visiting my parents in a more rural area but with good LOS across a small town valley, and I'm seeing lots of devices and even some conversations.
I have it in a utility pouch constantly plugged into a power bank that I keep topped off, so battery life isn't an issue (but it does run down quickly).
How is your antenna? Also if you're trying to use in while commuting I find that the metal panels in your car KILL the signal.
If you want better battery life then look at the heltech T114 or their new one the T096. Their battery consumption is WAY better than the ESP32 based boards.
Edit: also, some metro areas aren't running on the standard frequency or maybe on medium fast instead of long fast. Look to see if there is a meshtastic community in your area and see if they have custom settings.
Antenna is the default 2" that comes with the Heltec V3. And it's not just during the commute to work where I get no 'activity', but also while at work, where the radio is right next to a window that overlooks a fairly active arterial road. And again, I don't need better battery life because I don't use the radio on its own, I always have it in my EDC utility pouch plugged into a power bank.
Ideally you want something like the big one on this page. The difference is dramatic.
If you're not getting anything when youre doing all the right stuff in a metro area then I almost guarantee theyre working on different settings than default. At a minimum change it to medium fast to check that. When the ice protests where happening it got mentioned that Minneapolis was medium fast. Looking at meshmap Calgary AB is listed as a "custom" channel, whatever that means. LA looks like a mix of medium fast and long fast.
Also max out the transmission strength.
I started with meshtastic earlier this year and it has been pretty good. I put a solar node on top of my house and got some Wio L1 Pro's and swapped the antenna's out (this is almost a must to be usable).
My idea was to have my kids use them and that way they'd have a (non cellphone) communication device and I could get their location (shared on an encrypted channel). My hurdles there have been 1) my wife isnt that interested and theres a cell tower in her work parking lot that messes up reception 2) the kids were interested at first then stopped caring 3) one more thing to charge 4) their school has a no cell phone policy and consoder this a cell phone (rightly so)
In my case I feel like this is a solution looking for a problem. The only really legitimate use case I had was when I took them to a ski hill. The kids wanted to go do their own thing, I wanted to be able to keep tabs on them, and cell coverage is spotty (plus they don't have phones). In that situation it worked REALLY well. There were some dead spots and it wasn't 100% reliable but it worked very well.
As for meshcore vs meshtastic... I just lack the existing infrastructure nodes on meshcore to make it useful and in my hiking/skiing example meshtastic allowing all clients to repeat a message works better.
Im not impressed with the drama but I just don't get involved.
I had the same intention as you. But I couldn't find a device that was reasonable to give to a child.
By that I mean, most do not all are way too dev/tinkerer oriented. The ones that i found that aren't required a cellphone with the app to use.
The Wio L1 is ok. I also bought a t-deck but it's battery sucks too bad to be really useful for us.
That does seem like the best use case at present, particularly for meshtastic. Apparently meshcore has a mobile repeater function now but I have no idea how well that works in practice.
I would agree to a certain extent it’s a solution looking for a problem. It could be great in emergencies where the cellular network is down, and I guess its interesting because its so limited: text only, no images or video. Sometimes having limits can make things better.
Ohhhh. That might make it worth looking into then. My one concern is that the local meshtastic community is small and pretty quiet-- basically hasn't said a word about meshcore. There may be no interest in it.
Apparently, I’ve not tried it myself. here and here as well are post about it, and there is a fork called FieldMesh which might interest you (but seems quite new).
Has somebody look into Reticulum as well?
I have, it sounds good but not quite mature enough yet? Mostly a one man show who sounds like he is getting g burnt out. Not much adoption either as understand it. Also, I wonder if it will make less of a community as it is so flexible and less reliant on a single type of hardware.
I’d say what this space, I think it will eventually take off. Happy to be corrected if anyone knows anything more than my very superficial level knowledge!
I have a couple of T-Beam Supremes that I've been playing around with locally on reticulum. I added support for the LR1211 radios into RNode but as the original repo is archived there's nowhere to merge it upstream 😄
I'd say reticulum has more potential than the other options given its transport agnosticism but yes, heavily directed by one guy who has stepped back from public dev.
I'd say it needs a killer use case to really bring it into the spotlight, for me that would be something related to the telemetry side of things that Sideband for example works with.
Being able to gather encrypted by default sensor data across different connections and from anywhere in the world (assuming you have gateway nodes running over the internet) is a pretty powerful story and something I could see pushing it forward.
I do eventually plan to run a gateway node around our holiday place in the south of France as we have LOS across an entire valley and into the hills, but forgot to bring one with me this trip 🤦♂️
As the reticulum docs say, it's sorta reliant on people building out the networks they want to see and then potentially connecting up with sibling networks in a sort of loose, organic peering arrangement.
I got some Heltec units last year. Played around with them for a few weeks but ultimately returned them - it's neat in theory, maybe my area is too rural to see much activity. My girlfriend wasn't interested in playing around with them with me either 😔
Though one time I did catch a message from someone who said they were overhead on a plane! That was neat.
Was that with MeshCore or meshtastic? And where abouts are you based? I’m trying to get some IRL friends interested with limited success. My wife is interested and maybe I’ll get her a device to connect to (even if it will probably sit in the draw mostly)
They were Heltec ESP32v3 boards with stock antennas and Meshtastic firmware. I'm in a suburban/rural area in the eastern foothills of the Appalachias (eastern US).
Mesh network devices are a tough sell because it's only really useful if some catastrophic thing happens and there is no wifi or 5g internet access, but you still have your phone. And the interface is clunky. FRS/GMRS radios are easier to get that crowd into because they're mostly pick up and use, and can serve the same purpose as our phones currently do but also not exactly the same.
Not that I'm trying to convince you not to play with mesh networks - I think they're really neat, just have too many other things going on to dedicate the effort and money to messing with it. If I had been able to get more use from them with the (small) amount of effort I put in then I would have probably kept the units.
I've been playing with meshcore for a couple of months, there's a decent repeater spread around many of the Australian east coast cities - have a look at https://map.eastmesh.au/ to see the ones in range of a mqtt observer. There's links now running all the way from Melbourne through Canberra to Sydney (not super reliable for comms at this point but some adverts and messages get through all the way).
I went with meshcore over meshtastic as it seemed to be the more widely used network in the region and for a large scale network I think the repeater/companion separation makes more sense. I've put out a couple of repeaters myself and it is a bit satisfying when they start being useful parts of the mesh.
I'm not a particularly chatty sort of person when it comes to things like this and it seems many involved are similar as there isn't a huge amount of public chat over the mesh. You can however be pretty sure there's enough people connected that someone will answer a question or respond if something is asked or if you want confirmation that your companion is working. Occasionally public chat does get busy though if someone's kicked off something particularly interesting or controversial.
I did notice the recent leadership drama but I expect people will largely follow those who went to meshcore.io and it hopefully won't end up fracturing the mesh much. I've noticed stronger debate about radio settings in this region (Aus narrow vs Aus wide is something many have opinions on) and it's still ended up with people deciding to bridge into the wider mesh so hopefully if a split does happen software wise people will either just pick one or cooperate.
The network in Australia does look pretty good! In the UK there is a mesh all the way up the country, although connections to Scotland can be limited sometimes. I have got loads of messages from the Netherlands where it seems very popular as well.
I also think the community will probably all migrate to MeshCore.io, there hasn’t been much explanation of the ‘other side’ and registering for a trademark without telling anyone else is a bit dodgy.
I grabbed a couple heltec v4s. I've got one running 'tastic and one on 'core. There's a fairly active local community trying to build the mesh, but I struggle to get any real connection unless I travel to a known repeater location. I'm debating building my own repeater and attempting to deploy it.
Overall, when it works (which is rare), 'core does seem to work better sending and receiving, but it's more fun to see the map populate with 'tastic. At the moment, I'm enjoying the nerdy hobby but I'm not sure how long I'll stick with it.
Meshtastic and MeshCore are both fairly active in my metro area. I set up a Meshtastic node a while back but mostly ignored it until getting back into it this year.
What I found was what a lot of people have found: Meshtastic is great for sparse networks, but as things scale up, congestion becomes a big problem and reliability drops off. I bought a couple more nodes and switched them all over to MeshCore a few months ago. At least in my area, reliability on MeshCore is growing, and with repeaters going up on trees, towers, and mountaintops, messages hop a lot further than I think anyone expected. (Edit: As an example, the furthest contact on my map right now is about 350 miles away. This was supposed to be a metro-area-scale network. We might need to start using region tags to keep traffic local...)
I bought two more WisMesh Tags, they arrived this morning. I might be developing a problem.
Edit again: Forgot you asked about the current drama with MeshCore. I don't think it really imperils the project if that's what you're worried about. It's annoying, but ultimately it won't matter.
What area of the world are you in? I am
In the UK and I have seen messages from the Netherlands which is pretty cool. Also, what do people talk about other than testing and the mesh itself?
I don’t think the current drama is a big deal, and with each day it seems more and more clear MeshCore.io will be the new main website. But the whole drama was part of the reason I made this post just to get some discussion going!
Personally I would love it if meshtastic and MeshCore blended, with meshtastic like standard being used to find other companion devices nearby, then MeshCore being used for wider regional connections. But I doubt that will ever happen, decentralised tech gonna decentralise!
I'm in the US, eastern North Carolina. Things are building out to the point where I pretty regularly hear chatter from Tennessee, and there was some very impressive ducting the other day that let me pick up a repeater advert in Connecticut!
Netherlands -> UK is quite a feat, what kind of pathing lets you do that?
Public and #test are definitely the two most popular channels, and yeah, most of that is about the mesh itself. That makes sense enough: the mesh is growing fast, and people have a lot of gear to test. I'd like to see more chatter on smaller channels, but... then I'd have to be the change I want to see.
I can’t remember the path and haven’t had any more since, but I’ll keep an eye out! Maybe it was due to some optimal
Weather conditions, I’m not sure.
Have you made use of rooms at all?
Not at all, I keep forgetting they exist!
I messed with both systems a bit. The idea of the whole thing is very cool. Just like ham radio, though, I got bored pretty quickly. Most of the communication on the mesh is just test messages or #meshmonday stuff. I don't really know what I was expecting but seeing the upper US West Coast meshcore network is impressive.
Yeah I wish there was a bit more interesting chat. No reason there can’t be (or maybe even is on a non obvious channel). Maybe I should start posting stuff an a #politics channel just for some controversy…