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Meshtastic

79 points

by debo_

4 hours ago

| past

| 6 comments

| meshtastic.org

| HN

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angiolillo

1 hour ago

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I have a few LoRa radios running Meshtastic and they're fun to play with, but I wouldn't rely on them in a critical situation. It's too easy to accidentally configure a node incorrectly and cause problems for nearby nodes.

Perhaps someday the project will settle on a handful of sensible presets for different use cases. Even better would be if more of the options were managed dynamically by the software itself, things like adjusting timeouts and hops based on current network utilization and previous transmission success rate, or automatically tweaking the role based on the current mesh toplolgy, that sort of thing.

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cheschire

2 hours ago

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Alternatively…

https://reticulum.network/

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0x62

2 hours ago

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Huge fan of Reticulum, fixes some of my biggest gripes with Meshtastic. Shame it hasn't got as much adoption yet. For those looking for Meshtastic-equivalent things in the Reticulum ecosystem:

- Sideband: iOS/Android chat app (https://github.com/markqvist/Sideband)

- NomadNet: Desktop CLI chat app (https://github.com/markqvist/NomadNet)

- Rnode: Reference node hardware/firmware (https://unsigned.io/rnode/)

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maccam912

1 hour ago

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What are those gripes? If I don't have anyone else who would use it, but would hang out in a public chat room, it didn't seem like reticulum was the right choice for that? You need destinations on things?

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bb88

1 hour ago

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We have a relatively dense meshtastic in my city, and yet I can't reliably send a message across to my friend, who would be 4 hops away.

It's just not awesome. Especially compared to what you can do with ham radio.

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PBnFlash

1 hour ago

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It seems like big cities get congested, on marginal systems the chances of only getting half the messages is very high. It really dosnt integrate with much else, the mqtt stuff seems unreliable.

It does seem like the RNode radios are a lot less mature but they seem to be aiming to be less of a toy.

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MerrimanInd

42 minutes ago

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Meshcore is another alternative. I haven't done a deep dive into either but have heard that they both fix some Meshtastic issues.

https://meshcore.co.uk/

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greesil

1 hour ago

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First I've heard of this. My initial reaction is why oh god why this name. I liked Anathem, but seriously you're not going to using this as the Internet 3000 years from now.

Meshtastic at first glance seems silly. No routing, one spammer could mess up the whole thing. Hopefully this is better.

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gnabgib

4 hours ago

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Popular in:

2024 (335 points, 79 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829448

2022 (249 points, 90 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016142

2020 (620 points, 168 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540066

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tomhow

1 hour ago

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Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Meshtastic's Opposition to Proposed Changes on 900 MHz Band - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41242091 - Aug 2024 (16 comments)

Meshtastic: An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829448 - Jan 2024 (78 comments)

Meshtastic is an encrypted communications platform for the Lora RF protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016142 - July 2022 (88 comments)

We're making an open-source $30 GPS/mesh radio, would like advice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540066 - March 2020 (166 comments)

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scirob

3 hours ago

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Yea ppl know it but why not post again a very fun open project.

Here is part of the Berlin mesh https://potatomesh.net/

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thenthenthen

55 minutes ago

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Wow Freifunk on the Teufelsberg, what a great twist of faith or whatshouldicallit :D

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linsomniac

1 hour ago

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For the last 2-3 years I've been "this close" to getting a few devices and setting up a repeater node on my home roof and my office roof, and one to play with... I love the idea of bringing an alternative to SMS to my area. But at the end of the day, is anyone actually using it for anything?

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mertleee

4 hours ago

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This community is laughably caustic and abusive. My friend attempted to create a simple tutorial site and their org harassed him for over a year. He didn't even mention the word "meshtastic" and they made dozens of false trademark claims that his site could be "confused" with an official site.

I was previously a fan, but I'd never seen behavior like that from an "open source" project.

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bb88

1 hour ago

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One thing to keep in mind is that it's not even a very good mesh network.

There's a Zero Retries article recently with a critical review of meshtastic. Or find my comments on meshtastic here.

If anything they showed there's demand for a public mesh. Unfortunately, they didn't want to learn from AlohaNet or any of the other meshes.

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swaits

19 minutes ago

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You’re understating it. Meshtastic is horribly designed. If you designed a wireless mesh network making all the worst possible choices, with the most shortsighted design decisions imaginable, you’d get something a little better than Meshtastic.

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kop316

1 hour ago

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Heh, that isn't my experience.

I created a client Linux: https://gitlab.com/kop316/gtk-meshtastic-client and even posted it on their discussion page: https://github.com/orgs/meshtastic/discussions/99 . One of the maintainers responded positively to me: https://github.com/orgs/meshtastic/discussions/99#discussion... .