This is a subtoot and should probably be a blog post. But basically some techbros are re-inventing mesh radios (badly).
Low cost, developer friendly mesh radios have kinda been going in circles for decades. I've personally been watching this space for 20yrs & it's not progressing.
So in many ways I guess I shouldn't be surprised to review yet another cheap mesh radio project and realize, "dude this just plain sucks and isn't improving at all, oh and the community is kinda awful".
First the good.
The core tech of LoRa remains amazing.
The hardware has gotten DIRT CHEAP.
The idea that anyone can go buy a $10 circuit board, 3d print a case and have a radio that can talk privately to satellites or across town IS ground breaking!
The biggest break through lately is that the hardware IS good AND cheap at long last!
Some LoRa history.
First off a company called Semtech developed & patented the silicon to make LoRa radios back in 2014.
In the EU a corporate outfit, "The Things Network"(TTN), was the earliest adopter and created an open specification for a centralized LoRa network(LoRaWAN).
TTN feels a lot like a cellular network and isn't a mesh network. Suffers from the typical coporate conflicts but has a nice enough free tier and a fair bit of open source code behind it.
So the problems with the TTN is basically is a SaaS capitalist play. You buy a gateway, connect it to TTN then TTN sells access back to you and your community for your own hardware 🥴
They do give a free tier and act open but your hardware and data is THEIR profit center. Lame.
It's got a lot of network coverage in the EU, but never really took off in the US.
In practice the network in the EU is viable, the one in the US isn't.
In the end TTN/LoRaWAN make a ton of sense for corporate customers or people selling IoT gear to corporate buyers.
It works well where you have coverage. It's well designed and there's tons of quality hardware, though much of it not fully open.
LoRaWAN's claim to fame is that device data connections can be as cheap as $1/year and some of the gear like soil sensors can last for 10yrs on a single coincell battery.
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