A bit old but an interesting read.
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I think this is actually a very interesting thing.
Back in January, I purchased my first meshtastic node, and while it’s not solar powered, I know a lot of the repeaters are.
I have a Heltec MeshPocket which is a 10k mAh backup phone battery and meshtastic node. With how little power the meshtastic node uses i think i will get 30-45 days before needing to recharge.
I live in hurricane country so it is possible to be without power for a while.
Heshtastic is fun, but It has the issue (in my area at least) where a good half of the messages dont get through, even though there is at least 40 devices in our area. Its a problem. The bounce limit means we have issues communicating and it comes in waves/sporadically.
We have had more luck with meshcore getting the actual messages out, but it has the opposite problem. No one uses meshcore so it doesn’t matter how much better is it at communication.
Both are awesome projects dont get me wrong. I love playing around with both as a side hobby. Hopefully its better where you are at.
Ironically the best was a walky talky for emergencies.
I don’t care how bad meshtastic is because mesh core does not have open source client applications and therefore I won’t touch it with a 10 foot pole.
I’m one of those go-open source or go-home people.
Though, meshtastic have been doing some things recently to try to improve the routing, such as removing the repeater functionality entirely from the software, because repeaters did not show up in your list, and making it more difficult to use router mode so it gets used incorrectly less.
They just recently added a new client base mode that will act as a router for nodes in its favorites list, but act as a client for everybody else. So all you have to do is put up your node in your tree, or on your pole, or on your roof, and favorite your portable nodes, and it will act as a router for those, but it will act as a client for everybody else.
I believe they have also either entirely removed or turned telemetry way, way down so that it does not transmit telemetry very often or only on request. I’m not totally sure which.
What’s the channel utilization in your area? If you have 40 devices now, it may be time to move to a faster preset.
longfast. Thats about it. Ive had the system up for the last year and a half. Switched over to core and it stopped having issues all together communicating with a friend. I agree with you though, the lack of open source is a huge issue. MOST of the code is open source, but its strange their client is not. You can get around it by using the cli tools…but it just doesn’t have the traction meshtastic does.
What I really want is both to work together on a better repeater tech. Core is the only one I can get working over a fairly complex mesh. But meshtastic is much better in most other ways.
It should easily take the traffic, from what my RTLSDR says. Its just the amount of hops. It gets to 3 and stops. If you add more (say 5) it gets to a couple of friends of mine. But it starts doing some stuff to the network (lots of traffic in a short period of time). In an emergency situation, most of the mesh goes down (most of them are powered by the grid). But the personal ones were still working. But yeah the walky talkies were much better and working well at that time.
It sounds like your area is probably outgrowing longfast. They actually wrote an entire blog post about this particular issue.
https://meshtastic.org/blog/why-your-mesh-should-switch-from-longfast/
Edit: meshcore sits between MediumSlow and MediumFast meshtastic presets. So 40 nodes are trying to use a preset that is slower than what mesh core was using for very few nodes.
Interesting, maybe! Ill take a closer look with the RTLSDR. I could swear it wasnt as chatty before. Thanks!
Ironically the best was a walky talky for emergencies.
Those have extremely limited range and no mesh capability. And no way to store messages. And no encryption. So definitely not the best.
Another older example of this idea: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/
Ok, so I’ve never heard of this before. How does this differ from packet radio?
Meshtastic?
If so it runs on the ISM bands EU868MHz and USOL915MHz and uses chirp spread spectrum as its modulation. Packet radio such as APRS uses 2m ham band normally and is AFSK AX.25
The Raspberry Pi’s built-in Wi-Fi is perfect for our outdoor setup. It wirelessly connects to our home network, so no extra wiring was needed.
I want to call out that my router and Wi-Fi network are not solar-powered; they rely on my existing network setup and conventional power sources. So while the web server itself runs on solar power, other parts of the delivery chain still depend on traditional energy.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a cool project to make a solar-powered minicomputer, but the thing that makes it a server is conventional.
And they didn’t even try to solar power their ISP?!? The nerve of some people.
