A community to discuss Meshtastic (https://meshtastic.org/docs/introduction)
I've played with it a few times, it's very neat how it can mesh over basically any kind of data connection including AFSK over ham radio and stuff like that.
It feels more useful to me because it runs on other devices too other than just a LoRa device.
I did. Took a long time to setup and then found out some of the sample servers were down. I liked how on local mesh/Lora I was able to send images! That was cool.
Here's the visualizer showing the connections.
Nice!
If it's been a while meshchat has had a lot of work lately and was pretty easy to get going. Nomad takes a while to populate but I've hit a lot on the sample servers.
How do you find people with the same connection settings? If I understand correctly you need to use the same frequency, bandwidth, spreading factor, and coding rate to mesh up. So it seems impossible to do unless you already coordinated with someone you know.
I don’t think it’s really a replacement for meshtastic. This is more a tool for building networks over many different data streams. Can use RNode, packet radio, tcp/ip even just a serial connection will do it. It’s pretty cool. I have ew perimentinh with it over the last year+ and it’s getting a lot better. I see what the dev envisions and Its awesome. Will continue to follow and test. I am hoping to find other users locally and start building our own network/infrastructure.
The frequency and bandwidth are set per area pretty much the same as meshtastic. As far as connecting to people Lora is just one way to build the network and the rnodes should all work together.
Is there a chart you're referencing for that? I haven't seen anything about what areas use what bandwidth settings. I obviously know that US is 915mhz and I have a t-beam, but there are a lot of channels in the 915 band and I also have no idea what bandwidth people typically use. For meshtastic I only ever ended up using it between my own devices with a randomly picked bandwidth.
Edit: I found it: https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/wiki/Popular-RNode-Settings
I think Meshtastic had a similar page where people would try to coordinate settings, but I feel like there needs to be a scan mode or something that can find other people's channel settings without needing internet access would really help in an off grid scenario.
Oh, does the RNode firmware support v3 now? If so, nice. I was looking at playing with those, but at the time they only supported v2 and all I could buy were v3.
Yeah, flashed easily from the web. Meshchat and sideband have flashers too.
Did you find strangers to chat with?
Oh there's plenty, nothing on my local RNode yet but lots of random people and pages on the different reticulum interfaces tunneled over the internet and i2p.
Here a community I just started: !mander.xyz/c/Reticulum
Nice, thanks. I may revisit that project then (unless all I can find are v4 boards 😆)
I had not heard of Reticulum but I am certainly interested! Seeing as it can run on the same hardware, perhaps I will be able to justify buying all of those boards and antennas after all 😜
Can I ask if it's much of a pain to mod? Reticulum could probably use a community around here.
Nope, no pain!
Not clear if you are asking because you are curious and want to mod that community, or if you are asking me if I can mod the community 😅 I would prefer if someone else creates it simply because I still have no experience with Reticulum and because it is nice to have some diversity in the mods, but it also wouldn't be a big deal, I can make it if you would like.
No I'll do it, I've just been standoffish since the past spam stuff and I'm no expert. Oh btw thanks for keeping the best instance.
Ah, that's great, thanks!! If you need any help or decide to step away for any reason whatsoever I am always happy to help, no pressure at all.
Spam and spam bots are usually best handled with the admin because an admin account can ban accounts instance wide and delete all their content at once, so it is more efficient. They are not so common within this instance and they usually target large communities. So, I can help with this if it happens.
I seems pretty useful even beyond lora, and exploring the nomad network though all the different interfaces has a really early internet vibe.