Comment on This Tiny Radio Lets Me Send Texts Without Wi-Fi or Cell Service
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 days agoWhat kind of data rate can they provide? Can it support audio? Low bit-rate video?
I’ve seen LoRa when Pine64 announced some related products some years back, but I haven’t really gotten into it. If the community is big enough and the bitrate reasonable enough, I might get one to connect my home to my parents home (about 10 miles away, so at the edge of the range) for fun. It would be cool to set up some smart home stuff at both ends that I could host on my own so I can keep an “eye” on my parents stuff when the travel (mostly just door and occupancy sensors, no video)>
mesamunefire@piefed.social 3 days ago
In theory the protocol can support those formats. With meshtastic it's only designed for text. You can get some really basic emojis though since they are Unicode.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
If its simple enough, I could probably abuse it to send binary data by encoding everything in base64 or something, and writing a simple translator for whatever my app is.
But what does the usable bandwidth look like, and what about latency? If I’m going just out of range from direct communication, I assume I’d be going through other peoples’ nodes, but is that intelligent enough to route messages through efficiently? Or could I see crazy latency spikes?
mesamunefire@piefed.social 3 days ago
You are at the edge of what I know :) If you find out, let the rest of us know. I only have vauge and hand wavy knoledge at this point of lora slow means lots of latency. GL!