Is MeshCore a separate network?
Comment on I made a way to remotely control my homelab without any internet access required
litchralee@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
Very interesting! Im no longer pursuing Meshtastic – I’m changing over my hardware to run MeshCore now – but this is quite a neat thing you’ve done here.
As an aside, if you later want to have full networking connectivity (Layer 2) using the same style of encoding the data as messages, PPP is what could do that. If transported over Meshtastic, PPP could give you a standard IP network, and on top of that, you could have SSH to securely access your remote machine.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 hours ago
PetteriPano@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
In the EU we’re limited to a 10% duty cycle for LoRa, so we’re screwed even without traffic.
litchralee@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
Are ham radio operators in the EU able to use LoRa radios and be exempt from duty cycle limitations?
Estebiu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
Yeah, but you cannot use encryption then.
aclarke@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I started thinking about using the LoRa protocol directly for this too! My biggest concern is overwhelming the mesh. But I also had no idea what protocol would work so thanks for mentioning PPP. I haven’t thought about that since I was a kid! That would be really cool though!
Maybe just for a POC someday?
litchralee@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
Admittedly, I haven’t finished reflashing my formerly-Meshtastic LoRA radios with MeshCore yet, so I haven’t been able to play around with it yet. Although both mesh technologies are decent sized near me, I was swayed to MeshCore because I started looking into how the mesh algorithm works for both.
And what I learned – esp from following the #meshtastic and #meshcore hashtags on Mastodon – is that Meshtastic has some awful flooding behavior to send messages. Having worked in computer networks, this is a recipe for limiting the max size and performance of the mesh. Whereas MeshCore has a more sensible routing protocol for passing messages along.
My opinion is that mesh networking’s most important use-case should be reliability, since when everything else (eg fibre, cellular, landlines) stops working, people should be able to self organize and build a working communications system. This includes scenarios where people are sparsely spaced (eg hurricane disaster with people on rooftops awaiting rescue) but also extremely dense scenarios (eg a protest where the authorities intentionally shut off cell towers, or a Taylor Swift concert where data networks are completely congested). Meshtastic’s flooding would struggle in the latter scenario, to send a distress message away from the immediate vicinity. Whereas MeshCore would at least try to intelligently route through nodes that didn’t already receive the initial message.