I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

71 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by Panda_
(jonaharagon.com)

21 Comments

mycall

6 minutes ago

Does 802.11p work in any of these mesh networks? It could amplify their usefulness.

raffael_de

3 hours ago

This has been on here a couple of times the past few days or weeks. Finally pulled the trigger and bought a Seeed Studio Wio Tracker L1 Pro for MeshCore. I find the idea of a para-internet just fast enough for text based monomedia content highly appealing. Probably a mix of nostalgia but also realism - my thinking is that a network too slow for pictures / audio / video would elegantly avoid problems like spam and (illegal) pornography by design.

robotswantdata

an hour ago

Set up solar nodes last weekend. 200 miles of range now. Nerds, mad ideas. Good times.

giwook

an hour ago

What do you need 200 miles of range for?

Groxx

3 hours ago

>To be perfectly upfront with you, this post will be glossing over many Meshtastic and MeshCore features, because I feel they are both non-serious solutions compared to Reticulum for reasons I will explain later on in this post.

Yeah, that's the general feel I get every time I poke into Mesh*. Neat radio tech, fun toy to find other nearby nerds, instantly-obvious problems that are fatal to growing beyond being that toy (or small specialized personal nets, where it's totally fine). They feel more like a tech demo than anything actually intended to survive.

Which is fine, you kinda need that to start out, and they do work today. Just... hard to get excited about.

mingus88

3 hours ago

That weakness is a strength.

Everyone you meet on a mesh is a real breathing nerd, who due to proximity has a lot in common with you. They are not trying to influence you or sell you anything

How many places like that are left?

Groxx

2 hours ago

It's well suited for that at the moment, yeah - if that's what you're hoping to find by getting into it, it's pretty cheap and now's a great time.

mschuster91

an hour ago

> Everyone you meet on a mesh is a real breathing nerd, who due to proximity has a lot in common with you. They are not trying to influence you or sell you anything

I wish... the Hamburg Meshcore mesh has some dumbass spammer spamming far-right youtube videos in the public channel for example. And from what I hear, Meshtastic also has issues with this kind of idiots.

Karrot_Kream

2 hours ago

The inherent limitations of free spectrum mesh technologies will never lend itself to a replacement for the Internet so will always largely exist in niches. Niches like personal nets, local nerd networks, or emergency response (tho actual first responders are not the most eager to try this stuff based on my experiences in the community.) All of this can be a feature or a bug depending on whom you ask.

transcriptase

an hour ago

Every time I get excited about one of these techs I end up finding it has approx the same range as a late 90s cordless phone unless you live on the Nevada salt flats, and a data rate that could probably be beat out by Morse code on a GMRS radio. Sadly I live in the opposite of that terrain with approx the same population density.

Regardless I have a few LILYGO Meshtastic Esp32 boards that are neat to play around with!

willis936

42 minutes ago

I mean morse code on GMRS is actually an amazingly strong physics solution. Take the benefits of VHF propagation and combine it with high power limits and a coding scheme that is on par with FT8 for noisy channel resilience. No way a potato powered microwave is going to compete.

915 MHz mesh isn't a fair comparison. APRS is, but that requires licensing and unencrypted communication, so it gets less traffic. Quite good and fun though. I get point to point pings dozens of miles away daily.

ews

24 minutes ago

it works incredibly well at Burning Man, so you are completely right!

ericrosedev

2 hours ago

After seeing the Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers post today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297467 I wonder if they would pair well with Reticulum

Karrot_Kream

2 hours ago

These ideas yes, but these networks already have a concept of message oriented semantics and so there's not much of a need to rebuild most of those protocols. A lot of what Finger, Gopher, et al does is define the application layer semantics to transmit documents over stream oriented protocols.

jauntywundrkind

3 hours ago

In general I'm happy the longer range options are about, but I'd much rather see IP based ad-hoc communication. Wifi 802.11ah "halow" is such a more versatile structure than these limited networks.

More of everything, of course! But I'm far more interested in making the wifi we have more ad-hoc capable, more useful anywhere any time, for whatever, especially on the longer range bands like 900MHz.

Karrot_Kream

2 hours ago

Do you know what the MSS is on a Halow network? Curious if it makes sense to run usual TCP and UDP based applications on them or whether we would need to switch to things like CoAP.