Dear Fedi, what are your opinions about meshcore vs meshtastic?
Alex Akselrod
boosted
MeshCore has released their code today.
I've read most of the code and this is fairly early, limited docs, no mobile app and limited hardware testing.
That being said the over the air protocol+routing looks excellent. The code is well designed and fairly slim. The security posture is good and designed in from the start.
They get so much right in so little code. I even think I could make this messtastic compatible faster than they can improve.
Alex Akselrod
boosted
Lately a youtuber whose been doing a lot of videos about meshtastic just announced he's launching his own meshtastic replacement targeting the same hardware.
I watched a lot of Andy Kirby's videos and he seems to have an eye for the same sorts of problems I've mentioned with meshtastic so I'm very curious to see how his project goes.
They haven't released their code yet so we'll have to wait and see.
Ed Summers
boosted
This is what the Meshcore map looks like now in the Pacific Northwest. My little node can see over a hundred repeaters on the mesh.
We now regularly have chat conversations that span several cities and we have frequent posters from Canada. A typical day sees HUNDREDS of posts in the public channel. Whole sentences and thoughts, not just "ping".
Meshcore is really taking off!
A few weeks after the Mt Rainer feat, some friends went camping and hiking all around the Orcas islands and we never lost contact at all.
At times they had better connection to the mesh while camping than they do in the city.
They hiked up Mt Constitution and were able to get direct line of sight connections to repeaters in Seattle using a typical handheld LoRa radio with an external antenna.
Over this weekend I was sadly asleep for one of my favorite effects in radio, tropospheric ducting!
I'd read a paper years ago from a team who detected ducting events in 868MHz LoRaWAN networks. These events allow end devices to reach concentrator nodes hundreds of miles away, possibly even beyond the curve of the earth.
I was wondering if we'd see this in lora meshes and turns out YES!
There have been so many really cool developments in the last month just from adoption.
Recently someone hiked up Mt Rainer and had a conversation with us on the public meshcore chat. When I went through the cougar mountain repeater's logs I noticed my repeater in Seattle's U District was actually the first hop that was connecting them to the mesh.
If that wasn't wild enough, the hiker was using a TINY radio, the Seeed Studio t1000e 🤯
A few weeks after the Mt Rainer feat, some friends went camping and hiking all around the Orcas islands and we never lost contact at all.
At times they had better connection to the mesh while camping than they do in the city.
They hiked up Mt Constitution and were able to get direct line of sight connections to repeaters in Seattle using a typical handheld LoRa radio with an external antenna.
This is what the Meshcore map looks like now in the Pacific Northwest. My little node can see over a hundred repeaters on the mesh.
We now regularly have chat conversations that span several cities and we have frequent posters from Canada. A typical day sees HUNDREDS of posts in the public channel. Whole sentences and thoughts, not just "ping".
Meshcore is really taking off!
There have been so many really cool developments in the last month just from adoption.
Recently someone hiked up Mt Rainer and had a conversation with us on the public meshcore chat. When I went through the cougar mountain repeater's logs I noticed my repeater in Seattle's U District was actually the first hop that was connecting them to the mesh.
If that wasn't wild enough, the hiker was using a TINY radio, the Seeed Studio t1000e 🤯
This is what the Meshcore map looks like now in the Pacific Northwest. My little node can see over a hundred repeaters on the mesh.
We now regularly have chat conversations that span several cities and we have frequent posters from Canada. A typical day sees HUNDREDS of posts in the public channel. Whole sentences and thoughts, not just "ping".
Meshcore is really taking off!
¡Abbie!
boosted
Last night I meshed from south Vancouver island to Portland, over 300km using #meshcore
Last night I meshed from south Vancouver island to Portland, over 300km using #meshcore
The first new tool is lorapipe, a firmware that runs on most consumer LoRa radios.
We've tested it a ton on ESP32-S3 based Xiao Wio boards.
This turns your lora radio into extremely minimal serial device that sends and receives packets in a dirt simple CSV format.
The radio can be tuned on the fly to switch between meshcore, meshtastic and LoRaWAN sync words and frequencies.
phildini
boosted
Printed up some cases for my little army of Heltec V3 #MeshCore and #Meshtastic nodes.
Printed up some cases for my little army of Heltec V3 #MeshCore and #Meshtastic nodes.
You can see the code and adapt it to your situation.
It assumes that you have some number of esp32-s3 meshcore devices plugged in over USB to a Linux based device which the Action's runner can access.
Shout if you have patches, improvements or questions!
https://git.devhack.net/Hammers/MeshcoreDeployer
#opensource #meshcore #meshcoredeployer #lora #radio #cicd #devops #forgejo
Woot, just finished implementing my first GitHub / Forgejo Actions which allows me to programmatically push meshcore builds to my radios on the roof from the comfort of my browser.
It currently only supports deploying to esp32s3 based LoRa devices so far.
#meshcore #lora #radio #esp32 #cicd #meshcoredeployer #devops #forgejo
This is what a successful build will look like
This is my roof top development box. It has four esp32-s3 based Xiao Wio lora boards connected over USB to a raspberry pi.
The raspi is intrun powered by PoE
When deploying you'll be prompted to select a device to deploy to and configure the type of build needed.
MeshCore is a lightweight alternative to Meshtastic LoRa-based off-grid messaging - CNX Software
｢ While Meshtastic is by far the most popular off-grid messaging solution relying on LoRa radios, MeshCore offers an alternative as a lightweight C++ library and firmware designed for multi-hop packet routing and made for developers who want to create resilient, decentralized communication networks that work without the internet ｣
ok, well, flashed the Keltec v3 to #Meshcore, no problemo. But on my #grapheneos phone I can't get the meshcore app without using Aurora Store to grab it from Google Play. So did that, and then paired the device with my phone, but the app doesn't detect the device so I'm stuck with just no way to talk to it.
Well despite the lack of nodes in the area, I'm trying out #meshcore
really interesting to read @nullagent thread on LORA/ #meshtastic vs his preferred #meshcore. I'm also kinda surprised meshtastic uses the MAC as the identity, and if meshcore uses an encryption key that is really a huge improvement (decouples identity from radio). anyway I'll check out what's up on meshcore down here in LA.
Good news, there's an unreal amount of interest in meshcore lately.
My community came together and group purchased 20 nodes and have rapidly been onboaring tons of new LoRa curious hackers.
It looks like I might have single handedly increased the user base of the Seattle meshcore user base by 10 - 20%.
#meshcore #pnw #seattle #lora #meshtastic #mesh #radio #maker
