"Exploring Meshtastic" — lark.gay

Lark has written an article on his his experiments with Meshtastic, a LoRa based protocol.

Posted in: s/LoRa

💀 requiem [mod]

May 05 · 2 weeks ago · 👍 norayr, johano, chluehr, Half_Elf_Monk

2 Comments ↓

💀 requiem [OP/mod] · May 05 at 06:22:

Writing on Meshtastic, Lark wrote:

> The protocol allows you to connect meshes that are out of LoRa range of each other by tunneling traffic over the internet using the MQTT protocol. I set up an MQTT broker on my VPS, thinking I could get Meshtastic users in my local area to use it so we can actually communicate. But I'm kinda wondering what the point is—if we're just going to tunnel messages over the internet anyways, what's the point of having these finicky radios?

LoRa is used for a lot of IoT applications and it can be incredibly useful to have access to certain devices connected to LoRa while you are away. Think farming.

🌲 Half_Elf_Monk · May 17 at 17:48:

He's got a point. It's not a good drop-in substitute for a chat app. Then again, how often does alternate technology imply a paradigm shift in thinking/use? Maybe that's part of the benefit here...

Farming is a great option. Seems like home/property automation might benefit too... ("The lawnmower is set to mow the property at 3am. I can ping the weedwhacker, but I can't find it. The mini hydro plant is still operating.")

If nothing else, I like the idea that this could be used for communicating really far out of band. Too much of the best of our tech is being used to surveil and control. Humanity doesn't have a great track record with those kinds of powers. So maybe home automation that is "off grid" could be a freeing usecase...

idk. This stuff is fun.