There’s a live stream tomorrow on the 'tube setting up a MeshCore companion for sending messages over radio waves directly instead of relying on internet providers.
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BTW, Meshcore is MIT and not fully FOSS, while Meshtastic is GPL and fully FOSS.
And both use LoRa which is proprietary.
Fact, but since that’s common and cheap, and I’m not aware of an equivalent FOSS alternative, I’d go with Meshtastic, if were to dabble. And I dabble. :D
I believe the only part of Meshcore that’s not FOSS is the official app, and there’s a FOSS alternative.
Personally, I’d use Meshcore. I tried MT for a month or so. I never saw a conversation, just a few scattered “test” messages. Meanwhile, on MC, I was away from my phone for 4 hours yesterday and came back to 250+ coherent messages in a conversation from all over the region (not to mention the hundreds of test messages).
MT is better in ad-hoc situations since clients can repeat messages, but MC is better for establishing a region-wide communication network.
I use MC because the network is finally being built out in my area and I can actually successfully send messages over MC. I do wish there were better open sourced companion apps for MC though.
Just FYI at the speed meshtastic/core is talking about, it would be very slow. Like dialup would look fast.
But its a fun hobby! Take a look over at !meshtastic@mander.xyz for anyone interested. Meshtastic (and meshcore) are also SUUUPER alpha so dont expect anything polished.
correct, the real mesh internet replacement is HaLow, that can get a whopping 4Mbps or something.
I’ve been looking into this as well and just bought my first components.
I’m trying Meshtastic first and then will try Meshcore.
What does everybody think of Reticulum Network and RNode? It honestly seems superior conceptually to Meshtastic/Meshcore, but I’m not sure how good it is in practice or if anybody is actually using it.
People who studied the code speak really fondly about reticulum, however, it’s not as popular for building the lora based mesh networks, because the full stack does not run on the simple microcontroller. You need what is basically a standard PC connected to it. Given that mesh repeaters are usually designed to run off-grid on solar and battery, wasting additional power for a raspberry pi or similar computer would make the project unfeasible.
All while Meshtastic or Meshcore are perfectly happy with the esp32 or nrf microcontrollers. And the nrf ones can run without a direct sunshine for days with the reasonably large battery.
They’re working on fixing that ;) https://github.com/attermann/microReticulum