The official website has a lot of good resources. You can burn the firmware into the devices directly from there.
pfizer_dose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Two days from now there’s a seminar happening in the capital city of my country on a technology called mesh/meshtastic(?). They claim to have found a way to send messages in blackout conditions.
I’ts difficult to find resources but here’s a blogpost about it: blog.liamcottle.com/…/getting-started-with-meshta…
Not saying this is our solution, but I think these sorts of ideas and re-imaginings are what we ought to be in the pursuit of right now.
wintermute@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
ratel@mander.xyz 1 day ago
Have you checked out mander.xyz/c/meshtastic ?
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I just ordered a couple of meshtastic transceivers. Here’s what it is:
LoRa is a patented radio technique that uses some kind of fancy spread spectrum technique to give very low power sub-GHz UHF radio somewhat impressive range. We’re used to a single Wi-Fi access point being able to cover about the size of a large-ish house with wireless data. I can’t pick up my house Wi-Fi in my workshop at the back of my suburban property. LoRa manages to reach out several miles on the same amount of power as a Wi-Fi signal. The tradeoff is bandwidth. A typical Wi-Fi connection can stream video, LoRa isn’t really practical for much more than text messaging. It is my understanding that it’s designed to do things like industrial telemetry.
On top of this is built Meshtastic, an open source mesh networking protocol. You buy a little circuit board that’s got a microcontroller, a LoRa transceiver and a bluetooth transceiver. You flash the Meshtastic firmware to it, and now it is a “node.” “Nodes” can be configured in several ways, but in general they’ll sit there and scream into the void looking for other nodes. Messages sent are like “Tell John I say hello. Pass this on Three times.” If your node hears that message, it will automatically transmit “Tell John I say hello. pass this on Two times.” So in that way, nodes can automatically act as repeaters.
So they have astonishing range for their band and power, and the automatic relaying of messages means a message can propagate pretty far. Mind you, it has limitations similar to old school SMS; a message is pretty strictly limited to something like 288 characters, including emoji.
Many “nodes” don’t have much of an onboard UI; some do but the main intended way for the user to access a node is over bluetooth from the Meshtastic app running on an Android or iOS device. Some units do have onboard UIs or can host a web interface accessed via wi-fi or ethernet.
Meshtastic essentially forms an ad-hoc off-grid SMS-like service. The bandwidth is simply too low to allow anything like web hosting, audio or video. At a ham convention, several hundred nodes saturated the available bandwidth just with procedural pings leaving no room for actual traffic.
Encryption is permitted on this network, I wouldn’t exactly plan a coup over Meshtastic but I think I could coordinate meeting friends at a restaurant without being stalked.
If your project is to abandon the internet, this may be one of many tools necessary.
pfizer_dose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Woah thats insane, thanks for the summary. The stuff I had been reading about it was a bit dense for me as someone with 0 background in radio.
Maybe I’ll get one and become a node
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Yeah I hold a general class amateur radio license, and that’s helped me wrap my head around how it works. And I’ve still got a lot of "somehow"s in my understanding.