Its a LILYGO T3S3 (a module focused on handheld use) stuck into a housing I modeled myself and 3d printed out of ASA plastic. It has some Chinese “high gain” 915MHz antenna inside the grain silo looking part, which is oversize to prevent too much signal reflection/distortion from the plastic being too close to the antenna. Its powered by 18ga alarm system wire that I draped down the roof to a 5v power supply on the deck. And since I’m renting, non permanent modifications only, thus the clamp to the vent pipe.
Its what I had, just to get started. Quickly realized I needed to be on my roof to get any good connections in my node-sparse area haha.
So far it’s working well, I have 13 consistent mesh connections with 3 direct connections, when before I would previously only get spotty connections to the mesh at all from inside my house.
I’ll buy some better base station hardware later, once I put one up at my girlfriend’s house a few miles away…
ELIsysadmin?
You mention a node sparse neighborhood. Nodes of what platform?
Im gathering that there is a mesh network being slowly built? I have so many questions and concerns. What are we sharing and isn it bridged to the web and how are we isolating and securing.
A link further down the rabbit hole would be fine.
EDIT I’m an idiot and realized from the community name this is meshtastic. Rabbit hole here I come.
Haha, you have stumbled right into the nerd trap. Guessing you’re here from the All page.
This is a community (!meshtastic@mander.xyz) for the Meshtastic project, a short instant messaging system via a mesh network built on unlicensed LoRa embedded radio hardware. Designed for pure peer to peer mesh networks to run totally off grid and allow local communication even when regular infrastructure goes down. They are very low power and the hardware is very inexpensive (the actual device inside this station cost less than $30) meaning many nodes can be deployed for network resilience.
https://meshtastic.org/
Im not clear on what the network is used for
That’s fun the part - it’s used by nerds testing the network, sending “ping”. And others replying and setting up BBS systems.
Like…the old school BBS stuff? I thought there was texting and maybe email? Not sure as I am learning too. I’ve used BBSes in the past.
Its like a worse pager system. But it does not use the internet or anything centralized. It makes it look like texting on apps.
Yes, I’m digging the disconnected part, so I am interested. I am looking deeper at self-hosted processes and if they can be provided in a way other than the internet, all the better. Any recommendations on hardware? Looking for base station and portable when I am comfortable knowledge-wise. Any site better than another to source it? Can’t/won’t do amazon.
I usually direct people over to
helteks because they are cheap and you can get 2 of them in the same box. For more info you can check out the official meshtastic site.Or check out https://rootaccess.org/wiki/Meshtastic/rev447/#-quickstart
If you go with the defaults at least at first, you can see if its something you want to invest your time into. Worst case, you have a couple of these things you can give out to a couple of ham friends. You can go pretty deep with the hobby, but its fun (in my opinion).
Meshtastic is basically just texting, but there are nodes people setup for BBS purposes.
Its messaging. Think SMS but local mesh. I’m going to use it for weather stations and being goofy with friends, but it’s also resilient in case the internet goes down, I’ll still be able to talk to other mesh users.
This is my primary interest an independent resilient internet sounds very interesting.
Meshtastic is messaging only, not really an internet replacement- someone else in this thread mentioned Reticulum as a true networking layer run over LoRa and other hardware layers, might be more your speed.
Just note that many countries and cities are moving away from meshtastic to meshcore (same hardware, better protocol) due to scaling issues inherent in meshtastic
Australia is pretty much entirely meshcore apart from some abandoned derelict meshtastic nodes
I did see meshcore before I got into this stuff, but my issue is meshcore seems less resilient in lower density areas where there may not be many people investing in well positioned base stations. Almost all my typical use cases are very rural, where every possible node contact matters, and I do not have the money or physical access to set up enough of my own good base stations.
Meshcore nodes can all repeat messages now for the very circumstance you describe
This was a recent enhancement
…interesting… well, good thing it all uses the same hardware haha
However, if you are militant about open source, meshtastic is the only way to go, because for about a year, all the mesh core interface apps were closed source proprietary crapware, and some of the firmware for some of the devices is also proprietary.
I hope at some point, both will do interop. Its causing a bit of a splintering of the community…which really doesnt need to happen (mostly on discord and reddit from what I have been seeing). We are so small to begin with. And its not the devs doing it, it seems to be the community themselves. Which is again unfortunate.
Yeah, I’d say the only good thing is the fact that the radios can be flashed to either one of them very easily, so you’re not locked into one or the other.
Very true!
Yeah that’s also a good point. I am sort of half militant about open source, for something as independent as a mesh network I definitely prefer it. I’ll stay on meshtastic for now I think.
Honestly, I’m getting more and more militant about open source. The longer things go on and I see the crazy shit that companies are trying to do.
For example, I’ve been running LineageOS on my phone without Google Play services since 2018, because I don’t want anything to do with the Google Play Store. But the fact that Google is now trying to keep all Google certified devices from installing third-party applications, what’s to stop them from bringing that to AOSP in the future? So now I’m seriously looking into getting a Linux smartphone, even if it’s not quite ready for daily driving yet.
I’ve been perfectly happy with lineage, but now I’m seriously looking into PostmarketOS. I’m perfectly aware that it’s going to be rough for a while, but somebody has to take the plunge and be willing to smooth out some of the rough edges for others.