[Swlug] Mashtastic?

[Jonathan Marsden]

Rhys,

I've not used Meshtastic.  However...

There is a 2020 article on LoraWAN mesh networking at

  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7435450/

which might be worth a look as background, even though it is a few years old and a bit formal.

For open source free Lora networking, you might look at FDRS, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JI5wZABWmA .  Andreas Spiess, the creator of that video, has other Youtube videos on LoraWAN v3 etc. too.

These are not Meshtastic... to me at a first glance, Meshtastic looks semi-proprietary, and so not interesting.  When you see things like "Meshtastic® is a registered trademark of Meshtastic LLC. ", it doesn't bode well for real openness... however they claim on their legal page "We are merely geeks experimenting on a fun and free project.", so maybe there is hope?

At least some of the Meshtastic software does seem to be open source.  See https://github.com/meshtastic/python for the sources to their Python CLI client, for example.

A Meshtastic node using a Pi Pico and a Waveshare SX1262 module might be an inexpensive way to explore this technology further.  https://www.waveshare.com/product/raspberry-pi/boards-kits/raspberry-pi-pico-cat/pico-lora-sx1262-868m.htm .

Jonathan
-- 
  Jonathan Marsden
  Pastor, Deer Park Baptist Church, Tenby
  jmarsden at fastmail.fm

On Fri, 15 Dec 2023, at 14:53, Rhys Sage via Swlug wrote:

> I was just reading about "meshtastic" - some kind of wireless internet 
> using LoRa. That sounds quite intriguing. I haven't found much 
> information on it so far but had a look a the Meshtastic site. I wasn't 
> impressed to see all the software was proprietary. I'd like to see 
> open-source in Python. It sounds like a fun little thing I could do 
> with a 4-line LCD display, LoRa adaptor and a Pi Pico or an ATTiny88 
> and C++.
>
> Has anybody here any experience of Meshtastic?
>
> Rhys Sage
>
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